The Will to Live on: This Is Our Heritage

Rating:
Summary: a little chatty but deeply moving
Review: Anyone interested in Judaism, what it means to be a Jew, Jewish history, Jewish meaning will love this book. It's usually very well written eloquent prose although sometimes it's a bit too diary-conversational.

Rating:
Summary: A heartfelt look at Jewish survival!
Review: At 84 years of age, Herman Wouk, one of the giants of contemporary American Jewish literature, presents his view of the survival of the Jewish people. His narrative moves back and forth between a thumbnail sketch of Jewish history and a colorful personal history . He indicates that the two motivating forces that have kept Judaism cohesive and growing during the twentieth century--the Holocaust and the birth of the state of Israel--are no longer of recent enough memory in the younger generation to ensure Jewish survival. Are there other factors, as the twenty-first century begins, that can influence young Jews to preserve their ancient heritage? This is the tough question the author attempts to address.

Wouk's whirlwind tour of Jewish history is unsatisfactory because it flies through time and presumes an in-depth knowledge by the reader. Far more satisying are the author's personal reflections as to how his life experiences and knowledge of the past allow him to appreciate his Jewish heritage. What seem to be lacking at the beginning of the book book are fill-in-the-blank kind of things. It is almost as if the author's intention is to get his readers to find the missing information by going to Judaic sources and reading what they need to know to preserve the Jewish faith. Nice ploy!

THE WILL TO LIVE ON concludes with Wouk's thoughts about the survival of the Jewish people into the distant future. His impressions differ regarding the Jews of Israel and those of the diaspora. He has one especially important thought to share about how diaspora Jewry can ensure their survival. It's not worth peeking at the last few pages of the book ahead of time, however, because the strength of Wouk's case slowly builds throughout the narrative. The reader can then sit back and truly savor the elderly author's insightful conclusion.

Rating:
Summary: Portable, Pleasant, and Not Pedantic
Review: I read this book in three evening sessions, and, like his book written 40 years ago (This Is My God) Herman Wouk is at his relaxed best.

The Will to Live On is a delightful one-sided conversation in which the 82-year-old author talks about the loves of his life: Judaism, his family, and his people, or amchka (your people), sweeping through several thousand years of Jewish history and a lifetime of study, work, and just living as a Jew, son and grandson of immigrants, an American and a patriot.

Wouk, an ever-observant Orthodox believer, is a facinating person and believable because he has lived well, written well, and lived what he believes. But not only for his religious core is he interesting, but because, as the Jewish people like to say, he is a person, and the kind of person who can be truly Orthodox, without orthodoxy, and respectful of the vast differences within the Jewish experience, leaving no one out.

And while being Orthodox, Wouk calls himself a humanist, for which he gives only scant definition or explanation in his book... my only criticism. His claim to be a humanist, unless he has redefined the term in some cleaver way, does not jibe with his core message. Possibly, in spite of his full reading of Jewish scripture, the author has not read or understood the passage, "I will raise up your sons, O Zion, against your sons, O Greece."

He addresses himself largely to the great American Jewish community, which, he strongly implies, has gone about as far as it should go into the vanilla world of assimilation, better known to all ethnic and religious Americans as "the melting pot."

I saved the last few pages to read very slowly because they contain the reason for the book. The Will to Live On, of course, deals with the eternal and earthly struggle, miracle, and adventure of a people who, in spite of their unique relationship with their G-d, still need to seriously take stock of their heritage and their origins, lest they have nothing uniquely Jewish to pass on to their children, or no children to pass it on to. The last few pages contain Mr. Wouk's key to this restoration and I won't tell you what it is because you need to read the first 300 or so pages to appreciate the last two.

As a proper antecedant to Mr. Wouk's discussion, and for full impact, I would recommend Ehud Havazelet's recent book, titled Like Never Before.

May the author's your years continue, as he brings to completion more of those unfinished titles from his worn and torn file folders. Forty years was too long to wait for this one.

Rating:
Summary: Eloquent and Inspiring for the Most Part
Review: I would agree with the superlatives described in a previous review. I was particularly moved by the sweep of history described up through the 3rd Destruction. I was particularly moved by the section about the fall of the 2nd Temple and about Yahveh. The descriptions of Jewish literature and thought through the ages was very good.

Unfortunately, I was hoping for a more creative, less tradition bound ending, more in the style of Dershowitz in The Vanishing American Jew or Mordecai Kaplan in Judaism as a Civilization - see next paragraph). I have lately become a Reconstructionist Jew (a branch of Judaism founded by Mordecai Kaplan). Many of us find it particularly relevant to our needs as American Jews (our prior affiliations have been Reform). Not only was I puzzled to find the very word lacking as an option for the Jewish future anywhere in the book but lacking in all but one sentence in the middle of the book. Is he not familiar with it?

Elsewhere, I was confused by his use of the word Neology which I took as a critical bias toward one liberal theology?

After showing the book to a friend, I was suprised to learn about Wouk's misleading information with respect to Hannah Arendt's supposed relationship with a Nazi (via scholarly footnotes) which Wouk uses to discredit her views on the Eichmann trial in ..Banality of Evil. Her credentials are far better than Wouk implies. The distortion works in part by merging time periods of events separated by years.

Although Wouk admires an large number of intelligent people / leaders, to my recollection they are nearly if not all men.

After finishing the book, these considerations led me to be less confident about its overall accuracy .

Rating:
Summary: a little chatty but deeply moving
Review: In a career of fifty years or so, Herman Wouk has published less than a dozen novels. Fortunately, the time he puts into his work shows and nearly all of his works are five-star quality. This book, a non-fiction follow-up to This Is My God (which is the only book of his I haven't read), continues the high-quality trend.

Although designed for a Jewish audience, this book has plenty to offer anyone who wishes to learn more about Judaism and the direction it is going. This is a good blend of history, theology and memoir, well-organized and filled with detail without losing readability. I found of particular interest the second part, "The Heritage, or the Power of a Dream" which describes the sources of Jewish thought and tradition.

Although not very religious myself, I am often fascinated with religion, and this book is a good addition to my collection on the subject. As he states in the Afterword, "If this book in any way helps readers to rethink the [future of Judaism] for themselves, I will have done, to the best of my ability, what I set out to do." He has accomplished this task very well.

Rating:
Summary: Another fine Wouk book
Review: In a career of fifty years or so, Herman Wouk has published less than a dozen novels. Fortunately, the time he puts into his work shows and nearly all of his works are five-star quality. This book, a non-fiction follow-up to This Is My God (which is the only book of his I haven't read), continues the high-quality trend.

Although designed for a Jewish audience, this book has plenty to offer anyone who wishes to learn more about Judaism and the direction it is going. This is a good blend of history, theology and memoir, well-organized and filled with detail without losing readability. I found of particular interest the second part, "The Heritage, or the Power of a Dream" which describes the sources of Jewish thought and tradition.

Although not very religious myself, I am often fascinated with religion, and this book is a good addition to my collection on the subject. As he states in the Afterword, "If this book in any way helps readers to rethink the [future of Judaism] for themselves, I will have done, to the best of my ability, what I set out to do." He has accomplished this task very well.

Rating:
Summary: What is Yiddishkeit?
Review: One of many topics reviewed in this excellent book, possibly, but hopefully not the last of Herman Wouk's great literary career. From the author of numerous fictional works, including the epics Winds of War and War and Remembrance, this is the second of his major nonfiction books, published some 40 years after his first, "This is My God."

This 300-page book spans a greater time span, and is certainly more up to date than Heinrich Graetz's encyclopedic, multi-volume "History of the Jews." Aside from providing a succinct history of a people spanning over three millennia, Wouk addresses an even more important question of what will become of the Jews, having survived centuries of invasion, overthrow, exile, persecution and the Holocaust, only to be threatened with extinction through intermarriage and assimilation in the United States, and secular Judaism in Israel.

At times a difficult read because of its complex vocabulary, cultivated from Yiddish, Hebrew, Biblical and Talmudic colloquialisms, this is more than compensated for by its succinctness, its eyewitness perspective, and its inclusion in respective appendices, a glossary of terms, and biographical names.

Wouk certainly knows of what he speaks. Having been born into and Orthodox American Jewish family, Herman Wouk, is the grandson of a Russian Orthodox rabbi who moved to the United States in the 1920's, who later made aliyah in the 1950's, a member of what Tom Brokaw calls "The Greatest Generation," a World War II naval officer, a lifelong student of history, Old Testament, Talmud, Judaism, and Israel, Wouk has personally met such prominent figures as Prime Ministers Ben-Gurion and Ehud Barak of Israel, the Nobel winning physicist Richard Feynman. A must read for anyone interested in Jewish history, prognosis, Israel (ancient or modern)