PositiveTabletThey are, for many reasons, an astonishing read. Most viscerally and immediately, they deliver the pleasure of witnessing Czapski, standing in a bare barrack without a single printed volume at his disposal, delivering erudite talks that not only recall entire sections of Proust’s novel by heart but also provide valuable insights into what makes the 4,215-page work a territory so many of us continue to visit so frequently and with so much reverence.
Steven R. Weisman
RaveThe Wall Street JournalThe same ideological struggles that galvanized and polarized Jews in 1841 continue to do so in 2018 ... It’s an insight that infuses his book with a fresh sense of poignancy found lacking in other volumes of history. Drawing on a wide array of sources, he elegantly pulls out the occasional detail, using his seasoned reporter’s eye to jolt aged quarrels back to life ... This same journalist’s instinct, however, keeps Mr. Weisman from addressing questions that might have given his account additional layers of meaning ... Still, in giving us an account of how Jews became a part of America, even as they remained a people apart, Mr. Weisman’s meticulously researched and fluently argued book is a compelling story of a glorious past. It is also a guide to the foreseeable future.
Yossi Klein Halevi
RaveTabletUnsurprisingly for one of our finest writers, he avoids the two tender traps Israelis and Jews writing about what is often nebulously called \'the conflict\' too often commit: He is neither limply sentimental, apologizing for sins real and imagined, nor needlessly steely, harrumphing his truth to the exclusion of all other possible points of view ... The epistolary form is perfect for this sort of undertaking ... Halevi writes warmly, intimately, opening his mind and his heart to his imagined neighbor even when he acknowledges that same neighbor’s darkest biases ... All of that is enough of an achievement for a short and heartfelt book, but Letters, I suspect, will find readers very different from Halevi’s Palestinian neighbors (to whom the book, translated into Arabic, is offered for free online) ... We can ask for no better guide.
