Product Description

You sit at dinner with charming people in a dining room like any other. Yet you know that your hostess has lost a son and that her sister lost children in the 1973 war. A fact of Jewish life left unchanged by the creation of a Jewish State is that, "You cannot take your right to love for granted".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #362681 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Customer Reviews

Five stars for the writing alone
Irrespective of his political standpoints, it should not go unnoted that this book contains some of Bellow's sharpest, most insightful writing. His fiction had a tendency to oscillate quite severely between the big, baggy, discursive novels (e.g. Augie, Humbolt's, Herzog, et al.) and the tighter, more focussed works, such as The Victim and Seize the Day. I think I read somewhere how, quite late in his life (around the time he published "The Actual"), Bellow expressed an increased attraction for brevity and clarity in literature. If that's the case, I imagine he must have looked back upon "To Jerusalem and Back" with more than a little satisfaction.

This is Bellow at his lucid, comic best. The prose is that of a writer not over-confident, but hyper-confident - and with very good reason. Non-fiction is rarely this inventive, nor so colourful. His Dickensian eye for character and caricature is generously and brilliantly deployed, and he hurries the reader along like a breathless, slightly befuddled traveller, dragging us from location to location, and party to party, engaging in lofty discussions with unlikely characters, while at the same time regaling us with the sights and sounds and textures of a great city as it impresses itself upon his ever-attentive soul.

You don't have to agree with Bellow's views to enjoy this book. You don't even have to like Bellow's fiction. This may have been a left-hand work, but in terms of the quality of the writing, it ranks above many of the novels. It should be regarded as an ideal entry-point for anyone who hasn't yet sampled the great man's work.

It's just a shame he didn't write a bit more non-fiction. Not to worry, though - I'm off to read his collected essays next!

Disturbing look into the thoughts & lives of Jews and Israel
If one were supposed to read a personal account by someone who hobnobbed with heads of states, was received by religious leaders and counted famous poets amongst his list of friends, one might be granted leave to not do so. Not for this book. The Nobel Laureate moves easily and, importantly, humanly amongst personalities in the Jerusalem of the mid 70s. It is not important WHO he meets.. its the thoughts that the meetings foment in his head that count. The situation in Jerusalem; the situation of the state of Israel as a whole, is brought forth. And to someone like me, from a tamer society, born in times of peace, it is tremendously disturbing. Disturbing not because I get a glimpse into the tension that prevails in an otherwise mundane, daily life, but because of the timelessness of the situation. Now, a quarter of century later, perhaps, things are different. What is frightening is that the sentiments linger. They have changed shape and form, but you will recognise fragments of the elements that make this book memorable and worrying.

Disappointing
Very disappointing book. I expected much more from a writer with Bellow's talents, but found a rather tame, and very American, justification of Zionism laced with some trite observations about the European left. None of the conclusions about the human condition we might expect from a Nobel prize winner, as the hapless Arabs are even less a presence in the book than the European left.
Once or twice something memorable emerges, like a young Jewish mathematician who solved several important maths problems while in a Soviet gulag, but nothing that sustains the book.
Read Sami Michael's novel 'Victoria' instead.