The Book and the Sword: A Life of Learning in the Throes of the Holocaust

Romanian-born Halivni (Sources and Traditions), who hails from the same village, Sighet, as Elie Wiesel, with whom he became friends after the war, comments that ""There is no dearth of memoirs by survivors"" of the Holocaust, which he calls ""an event without explanation."" Halivni began his studies of the Talmud at the age of five and was considered a prodigy. The only member of his immediate family to survive WWII, he eventually settled in the U.S., where he became a Talmudic scholar and teacher at Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City and eventually was made a professor of religion at Columbia University. His reason for writing his memoirs now is ""to define myself spiritually in the light of the Holocaust."" Remembering the suffering of the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis, he maintains, is an ""act of defiance,"" because the aim of the Hitler regime was to wipe out European Jewry. This searching, honest work, told with passion but no sentimentality, will speak to those who have sought to maintain a belief in God despite evils witnessed in this life. (Nov.)