After One-hundred-and-twenty (ebook)

Argumento de After One-hundred-and-twenty (ebook)

"Hillel Halkin is an uncommon and essential figure in Jewish intellectual life--a man at home in the entirety of the tradition and its languages, a secularist fascinated by religion, a scholar in the thick of the world, a critic with an insatiable appetite for exploration. All his writing is informed by a princely pride, wholly justified, in the resources of Jewish literature for the understanding of human existence. After One-Hundred-and-Twenty--this lively, even scintillating book about the passing of life--generously displays all of Halkin's virtues. It will enlighten its mortal readers, and even help them."--Leon Wieseltier

"This is a most remarkable and beautifully written book. Halkin elegantly weaves together illuminating scholarly examinations of various Jewish ideas about death, mourning, and the afterlife with his own wonderfully honest, humane, and deeply moving personal reflections on these subjects and on his own mortality. After One-Hundred-and-Twenty is in a class by itself."--Leon R. Kass, author of The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis

"Hillel Halkin displays an impressive mastery of source material and writes with his customary flair and grace."--Allan Nadler, Drew University, author of The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture

"Literary scholar, premier translator of Hebrew and Yiddish literatures, depth reporter on modern Israeli life, and on the far side of 75, Halkin is just the man to condense the riches of Jewish thanatology. . . . What begins as analytic history ends in deeply moving, reflective memoir."--Ray Olson, Booklist

"[A]n accessible and trenchant exploration of Judaism’s evolving concepts of death with his own struggle with understanding it. . . . Halkin’s frankness about his own difficulties in coming to terms with his parents’ deaths and traditional Jewish rituals such as sitting shiva help make this nuanced quest for meaning personal and affecting."--Publisher’s Weekly

"By combining historical examples with his firsthand experiences, Halkin has created a well-rounded and thoroughly readable examination of how Jews face the unknown."--Jeff Fleischer, Foreword0