by Yoram Kaniuk
Yoram Kaniuk has been hailed as “one of the most innovative, brilliant novelists in the Western World,” and The Last Jew is his exhilarating masterwork (The New York Times).
Like Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Last Jew is a sweeping saga that captures the troubled history and culture of an entire people through the prism of one family. From the chilling opening scene of a soldier returning home in a fog of battle trauma, the novel moves backward through time and across continents until Kaniuk has succeeded in bringing to life the twentieth century’s most unsettling legacy: the anxieties of modern Europe, which begat the Holocaust, and in turn the birth of Israel and the swirling cauldron that is the Middle East. With the unforgettable character of Ebenezer Schneerson—the eponymous last Jew—at its center, Kaniuk weaves an ingenious tapestry of Jewish identity that is alternately tragic, absurd, enigmatic, and heartbreaking.
“A true work of art, free from emotional manipulations.” —The Washington Post
Yoram Kaniuk has been hailed as “one of the most innovative, brilliant novelists in the Western World,” and The Last Jew is his exhilarating masterwork (The New York Times).
Like Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Last Jew is a sweeping saga that captures the troubled history and culture of an entire people through the prism of one family. From the chilling opening scene of a soldier returning home in a fog of battle trauma, the novel moves backward through time and across continents until Kaniuk has succeeded in bringing to life the twentieth century’s most unsettling legacy: the anxieties of modern Europe, which begat the Holocaust, and in turn the birth of Israel and the swirling cauldron that is the Middle East. With the unforgettable character of Ebenezer Schneerson—the eponymous last Jew—at its center, Kaniuk weaves an ingenious tapestry of Jewish identity that is alternately tragic, absurd, enigmatic, and heartbreaking.
“A true work of art, free from emotional manipulations.” —The Washington Post
Reviews-
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January 30, 2006
In this epic novel (originally published in Hebrew in 1982), Kaniuk, one of Israel's foremost writers, attempts both to cut through and to portray the lingering fog of WWII, the aftereffects of the holocaust and the conflicts surrounding the creation of Israel. Set in various parts of Europe and Isreal, the story revolves around the interconnected lives of three families-two Jewish and one German. When Ebenezer Schneerson, a Jew, returns from WWII, he finds that he has lost all of his own memories, yet can mysteriously recite every last scrap of Jewish culture, from Einstein's theories to the personal histories of families he has never known. He is pursued by a Jewish teacher and a German writer, each seeking to write the definitive account of Schneerson, dubbed the "Last Jew." Kaniuk makes readers work hard to piece together the fragmented story. His headlong, associative sentences, some of which go on for pages, mirror the characters' labyrinthine imaginations, memories, emotions and perceptions, which are all further complicated by the traumas of war. As the story slowly unfolds in a Joycean stream of consciousness, Kaniuk (Adam Resurrected, 2000) presents a layered, sweeping panorama of 20th Century Jewish life and identity. -
December 1, 2005
Internationally known Israeli author Kaniuk ("A Plan for Peace") offers a brilliant tour de force in his latest book to be translated into English. The life of protagonist Ebenezer Schneerson epitomizes the rise and fall of the modern history of the Jewish people, whose presentation here alternates between the realistic and the fantastical. In odyssey fashion, Schneerson travels from Palestine to Europe in search of his past, leaving his young son behind. As World War II looms, he gets mired in the Holocaust and survives a concentration camp only by becoming court jester to the camp commander. A prodigious memory (he can recite the entire genealogy of the Jewish people and all of Yiddish poetry) makes him a salable oddity -after the war, a man he met at the camp parades him around Europe in freak shows. Schneerson's adventures continue in America and Israel, where he is at last reunited with his son. A fascinating page-turner, epic in nature, this book explores Jewish identity in kaleidoscopic form. Recommended for all libraries." -Molly Abramowitz, Silver Spring, MD"Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from December 15, 2005
A disoriented veteran of Israel's 1948 War of Independence, Boaz Schneerson wanders the streets of Tel Aviv in search of "a new biography he can live in." His amnesiac father--civilian survivor of the Holocaust--traverses Europe, alternately enthralling and disgusting cabaret audiences with bizarre multilingual recitals of Einstein's theory of relativity interlaced with the Talmudic wisdom of preconquest Spanish Jews and the illicit amours of medieval popes. Father and son, the Schneersons have captivated readers of world literature since 1982, when " The Last Jew "first appeared in Hebrew. Fortunately, an adept translator has now ushered the Schneersons--with all their treacherous and bewildering retinue--into the English-speaking world. Not for casual perusal, " The Last Jew "makes heavy demands on its readers, compelling them--as does Faulkner's " As I Lay Dying "or Joyce's " Ulysses--"to find a context and meaning for the fractured perceptions and convoluted lives of the characters that confront them. But the readers' struggle for meaning mirrors that of the characters as they wander personal labyrinths, desperately trying to recover and make sense of their dark individual and collective memories. Ultimately, the disorienting narrative exposes the precariousness of Jewish identity in a hostile world, where betrayal engenders Jewish history and cupidity feeds off of Jewish grief. The reader concludes not with a sense of closure and reassurance but rather with a painful awareness of the unfinished tasks facing a long-beleaguered people. Neither critical theory nor archetypal psychology will soon exhaust this deep literary well. An essential acquisition.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)
