Biographies and Autobiographies
For these two giants, their own works and lives outshine these efforts.
reviewed by Allan Gould
Many of us love biographies (and autobiographies), and with good reason: they often provide the opportunity to get inside the heads of men and women who have done Great Things, and they can inspire us to be better human beings. I've just finished reading two such books, and by sheer chance, I had the great honour of knowing both of these Heroes personally: Rabbi Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel, with whom I spoke and met several times during my years working in the American Civil Rights movement, and Canada's own Emil Fackenheim, who adopted my wife, myself and our children over a fifteen year period (and we, their children), before he made aliyah to Jerusalem in the early 1980s. These two giants had much in common: both were born and raised in Europe; both barely escaped joining nearly six million other Jews in mass graves during the Holocaust; both were forced to begin their lives over again in North America; both wrote some of the most popular and important books of Jewish philosophy and thought of the 20th century.
I am sad to report that Fackenheim's autobiography, An Epitaph for German Judaism: From Halle to Jerusalem (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), is not very satisfying: it is jerky, incomplete, often out-of-order, and does not give much insight into his thinking. His thousands of students from the philosophy courses he taught at the University of Toronto may be intrigued (as I certainly was, as a close friend) to read of his youth and education in Halle, Germany, his studies with Leo Baeck, his imprisonment in Canada (in the early 1940s), when every German immigrant was deemed suspect--even those who were driven out by the Nazis!), his brief, unhappy career as a rabbi in Hamilton, Ontario; his late discovery (1967!) of the Shoah as a central event in Jewish history and philosophy, his determination to move to the State of Israel. But it is not the autobiography I had prayed for, as he was nearly 80 when he began it, and it lacks the focus and brilliance of his best books. Read Fackenheim's To Mend the World and What is Judaism? to best appreciate his importance and impact on modern Jewish thought, please.
A far better work is the biography in two parts; the second was just published by Yale U. Press; the first, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness, by Edward Kaplan and Samuel Dresner, is from 1998 and now in paperback. Like Canada's Fackenheim, Heschel was a moral and spiritual giant; unlike the former, he was a descendant of Hassidim, born and raised in Warsaw, Orthodox in practice, who wrote English--perhaps his fifth or sixth language--like a world-class poet, and even helped push African-Americans into the mainstream of U.S. society, and bring the Vietnam War to an end. I was so moved to read of his success as a poet in Yiddish, his hiring of tutors to teach him Polish and Latin, his studies and friendships with Leo Baeck, Bialik, even the future Lubavitcher Rebbi (Menachem Mendel Schneerson), his determination that the world take the Bible seriously; his mixing of mysticism and moral action. And there is even Canadian content in Heschel's story: he tutored a young rabbinical student in Berlin named Gunther Plaut, who would later become a great Torah scholar and leader of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto for years!
The Heschel biography is not great art, and it cannot hold a Hanukkah candle to the blazingly beautiful writing of its subject, the amazing Dr. Heschel. As with the Fackenheim autobiography, I urge you--no, I beg you--to return to the source, itself: in Abraham Joshua Heschel's case, please read The Sabbath and The Earth is the Lord's and Israel: An Echo of Eternity. Or, best of all, buy and read Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, essays by the magnificent Heschel, edited by his daughter Susannah. A perfect way to end this review would be to quote Heschel from an interview conducted shortly before his death. He was asked "What is the meaning of God." He replied, ". . .there is a meaning beyond mystery. That holiness conquers absurdity. And without holiness, we will sink in absurdity."
Allan Gould is an author and journalist who has long studied with Kolel and supported it. He is teaching his fourth course for Kolel in Toronto, in the fall of 2007, on Modern Jewish Literature. (Visit his website: http://www.allangould.com)
