Yosl Rakover Talks to God

Zusatztext "A singular literary creation! worth pondering for generations to come." -- The Jerusalem Report " The text is a quarrel as much as a prayer! an assertion of faith and a simultaneous refusal to accept the traditional notion that God hides his face in response to human sin." -- The New York Times " Yosl Rakover is one of those runaway masterpieces whose energy makes them explode off the page." -- Le Nouvel Observateur (France) "Remarkable . . . a grim but beautiful story." -- Los Angeles Times Informationen zum Autor Zvi Kolitz Klappentext There are two stories here. One is the now legendary tale of a defiant Jew's refusal to abandon God, even in the face of the greatest suffering the world has known, a testament of faith that has taken on an unpredictable and fascinating life of its own and has often been thought to be a direct testament from the Holocaust. The parallel story is that of Zvi Kolitz, the true author, whose connection to Yosl Rakover has been obscured over the fifty years since its original appearance. German journalist Paul Badde tells how a young man came to write this classic response to evil, and then was nearly written out of its history. With brief commentaries by French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and Leon Wieseltier, author of Kaddish, this edition presents a religious classic and the very human story behind it.In one of the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, preserved in a little bottle and concealed amongst heaps of charred stone and human bones, the following testament was found, written in the last hours of the ghetto by a Jew named Yosl Rakover. Warsaw, 28 April 1943 I, Yosl, son of David Rakover of Tarnopol, a follower of the Rabbi of Ger and descendant of the righteous, learned, and holy ones of the families Rakover and Maysels, am writing these lines as the houses of the Warsaw Ghetto are in flames, and the house I am in is one of the last that has not yet caught fire. For several hours now we have been under raging artillery fire and all around me walls are exploding and shattering in the hail of shells. It will not be long before this house I'm in, like almost all the houses in the ghetto, will become the grave of its inhabitants and defenders. Fiery red bolts of sunlight piercing through the little half-walled-up window in my room, out of which we've been shooting at the enemy day and night, tell me that it must be almost evening, just before sundown. The sun probably has no idea how little I regret that I shall never see it again. A strange thing has happened to us: all our ideas and feelings have changed. Death, quick death that comes in an instant, is to us a deliverer, a liberator who breaks our chains. The animals of the forest seem so dear and precious to me that it pains my heart to hear the criminals who are now masters of Europe likened to them. It is not true that there is something of the animal in Hitler. He is -- I am utterly convinced of it -- a typical child of modern man. Mankind has borne him and raised him and he is the direct, unfeigned expression of mankind's innermost, deepest-hidden urges. In a forest where I was hiding, I met a dog one night, a sick, starving, crazed dog, his tail between his legs. Immediately we felt our common situation, for no dog's situation is a whit better than our own. He rubbed up against me, buried his head in my lap, and licked my hands. I don't know if I have ever wept the way I wept that night; I wrapped myself around his neck and cried like a child. If I stress the fact that I envied the animals then, no one should be surprised. But what I felt back then was more than envy; it was shame. I was ashamed be-fore the dog, for being not a dog but a man. That is how it is, and such is the spiritual condition we have reached: life is a calamity -- death, a liberator -- man, a plague -- beast, an ideal -- day, a...

Product details

• Authors: Zvi Kolitz
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 10.10.2000
• EAN: 9780375708404
• ISBN: 978-0-375-70840-4
• No. of pages: 112
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 202 mm x 8 mm
• Series: Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature