Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on April 14, 2015

ALL WHO GO DO NOT RETURN

By Shulem Deen. (Graywolf Press, 320 pages, $16.)

In this painful and elegiac memoir, Shulem Deen, a former Skverer Hasidic Jew from New York City, eloquently describes his agonizing fall from faith and ascendant longing to live in a less insular world than the subculture he grew up in and in which he became a husband and father of five.

The result of his crisis of faith was the loss of his family in fact, of the whole world he had known and once dearly loved. And yet, it could not have been otherwise, given Deens questioning intellect and honesty.

While his memoir is set in a small and undeniably suffocating culture few of us will ever experience, his story of innocence slipping away will resonate with anyone who has ever struggled with doubts and dreams that their family and community cannot accept, and in fact denounce.

Deen is a profoundly intelligent thinker and writer whose sorrow is as deep as that in a sad Psalm. Heres hoping that he can console himself over all he has lost the worst loss being his children, who have been told that their father is lost and evil with the faith that his memoir will help many others survive being caught in the merciless and ultimately irreconcilable squeeze between ancient and modern worlds.

PAMELA MILLER,

West/north metro team leader

BY NIGHT THE MOUNTAIN BURNS

By Juan Tomas Avila Laurel, translated from the Spanish by Jethro Soutar. (And Other Stories, 275 pages, $15.95.)

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REVIEWS: 'All Who Go Do Not Return,' by Shulem Deen, and 'By Night the Mountain Burns,' by Juan Tomas Avila Laurel

Category: Hasidic
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