Rating: 
Summary: Wildly inventive, haunting and magical...
Review: After his murder by the Nazis, Chaim Skibelski finds himself giddy and ecstatic, despite lying dead in a pit with all of his neighbours. He begins a fantastic quest, searching to be reunited with his family and community, and to find the peace of the World To Come. But in the meantime, he wanders "the earth like an audience at intermission waiting for the concert to resume , unaware that the musicians have long since departed for home ?". In this imaginative work, Joesph Skibell succeeds magnificently in conveying the tragic scope of the Holocaust. But he never succumbs to the sentimentality or self-righteousness of other holocaust memoirs. With humor, a fine ear for dialogue, and a piercing wit he weaves his allegory. Truly, I laughed and I cried - but never felt manipulated. This is a an important work in its own right and a major step forward in the breadth of artistic expression that the Holocaust has inspired. A great book and a gripping page-turner, this novel will appeal to many who would not otherwise pick up anything from the Holocaust genre.
Rating:
Summary: A great book and a gripping page-turner
Review: After his murder by the Nazis, Chaim Skibelski finds himself giddy and ecstatic, despite lying dead in a pit with all of his neighbours. He begins a fantastic quest, searching to be reunited with his family and community, and to find the peace of the World To Come. But in the meantime, he wanders "the earth like an audience at intermission waiting for the concert to resume , unaware that the musicians have long since departed for home ?". In this imaginative work, Joesph Skibell succeeds magnificently in conveying the tragic scope of the Holocaust. But he never succumbs to the sentimentality or self-righteousness of other holocaust memoirs. With humor, a fine ear for dialogue, and a piercing wit he weaves his allegory. Truly, I laughed and I cried - but never felt manipulated. This is a an important work in its own right and a major step forward in the breadth of artistic expression that the Holocaust has inspired. A great book and a gripping page-turner, this novel will appeal to many who would not otherwise pick up anything from the Holocaust genre.
Rating: 
Summary: As a fable on the Holocaust, the book reaches many levels of
Review: As a fable on the Holocaust, the book reaches many levels of meaning. The living murdered Jews in the book, and the main character Chaim Skibelsky are testimony to the fact that we can die many deaths. Their wandering in the forest, frequently a symbol of confusion, their one night rescue in a fantasy hotel, and their ultimate redemption are powerful reminders that reality is not the only sense of life. With the return of the lost moon, the sacred cycles of life for Jews can resume. The details of the murder are devastating, and the life of the dead are told with great humor. For any one familiar with Hasidic tales, A Blessing on the Moon will be a contemporary masterful addition to that literature. For those uninitiated to its magic realism, you are in for a treat. I recommend reading The Far Euphrates in conjunction with this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Wait for the movie.
Review: Blessing on the Moon took me only 3 hours to read. I got the impression I was reading a play that had been converted to a novella. The characters are two-dimensional, the dialog stiff and the setting vague. The book should be made into a screenplay--that way we could see what the author has failed to describe. An important message but the wrong medium.
Rating: 
Summary: background on "A BLESSING ON THE MOON"
Review: I grew up surrounded by great-aunts and -uncles and my grandparents, who were all European Jews. My grandfather and his brothers were the sons of Chaim Skibelski, the protagonist of my book. Chaim had had ten children. All of his daughters and one of his sons died in the war, and also all their children. My grandfather escaped, as did my uncle Sidney, who fled Poland with his wife Regina, and wound up in a Soviet work prison, which was nearly as bas as a German concentration camp. Eventually, they made it to America, after the war. All in all, about eighteen members of our immediate family had just disappeared, violently, from the face of the earth. And no one ever talked about it when I was growing up.This silence, I think, haunted me as a child and formed my character in a number of ways which eventually were not that pleasing to me. So "A BLESSING ON THE MOON" is an attempt on my part to recover from the silence a family history that, except for a clutch of photos and whatever is encoded genetically, has all but disappared. It's an imaginative reconstruction, of course, not a historical one, and because of that, I feel it is somehow truer.
-- From "The Invisible Backdrop," an interview with Joseph Skibell available in the reader's guide for "A BLESSING ON THE MOON" and also in the Algonkian, June 1997, a small periodical about its books published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
Rating:
Summary: A blast and mostly satisfying
Review: I thought this book was very engaging and superb at the emotional play. There's a scene where, after encountering the horrors of his fellow Jews beginning to rot, Chaim meets a soldier (now beheaded and carrying his head around) and in a fury starts kicking the head down the hill. And yet later, he carries the soldier's head for him. To me, that combination (horror, hilarity and unowed kindness) somehow characterizes the experience of the Jewish people in an intimate, gut-level way that is hard to capture.
Though other readers may be disconcerted by a certain lack of connection between the pieces, I enjoyed it quite thoroughly.
Rating:
Summary: Magical!
Review: It is nothing short of magic to be swept inside a book. `A Blessing on the Moon' captured both my heart and my imagination. Starting from the point where most stories of the holocaust end, Skibell takes the reader into a spiritual world mixed with realism and fable, warm humor and the ugliness of hatred and ignorance. Within the first few lines of the book, the main character is killed. But Skibell does not end the character's life there. That is where the story is just beginning. Skibell takes the character and the reader on a journey of the soul. It's an exploration into compassion and grief, love and the depth of hate. I didn't want to put the book down and when I did, I found myself thinking about and worrying about the characters. They seemlessly worked their way inside me. Brilliant and insightful writing. Thank God for a book that is imaginative, intelligent and that offers hope in the worst of despair.
Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece!
Review: Joseph Skibell has written that rare book that I couldn't put down. Telling the story from the viewpoint of a Jew shot to death in the Holocaust who must roam the earth dead before going to the World-to-Come, "A Blessing on the Moon", while a story of the agony of the Jews in the Holocaust, is at times funny, sardonic, tender, horror-filled--there just aren't enough adjectives. This Christian found it to be more revealing to me of the Jewish mind, religion, and the atrocities committed against the Jews than any other book I've ever read. The only thing that made me sorry was my lack of understanding of some of the Yiddish words and expressions. However, I will read this book again and again, and recommend it to anybody who appreciates well-crafted writing.
Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece!
Review: Joseph Skibell has written that rare book that I couldn't put down. Telling the story from the viewpoint of a Jew shot to death in the Holocaust who must roam the earth dead before going to the World-to-Come, "A Blessing on the Moon", while a story of the agony of the Jews in the Holocaust, is at times funny, sardonic, tender, horror-filled--there just aren't enough adjectives. This Christian found it to be more revealing to me of the Jewish mind, religion, and the atrocities committed against the Jews than any other book I've ever read. The only thing that made me sorry was my lack of understanding of some of the Yiddish words and expressions. However, I will read this book again and again, and recommend it to anybody who appreciates well-crafted writing.
Rating:
Summary: The Truth Was Disturbing Enough
Review: Magical Fiction about the Holocaust, how will this instruct us when the truth was more unsettling than anything that can be imagined? This novel was well-written, yes, disturbing and painful to read, as any fiction with such subject matter must be, but I found myself wondering why I went on this journey and what the young American author felt he could tell me that survivor fiction and non-fiction had not already. I felt the Holocaust exploited and regretted having read this book. I'm going back to my Primo Levi, my Paul Celan.
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