|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Lis Harris, Holy Days (1975) Most of the book appeared in The New Yorker where Harris was a staff writer before it was printed. The book is an amazing look into a community, a fundamentalist religious group that is around us every day, yet a complete mystery. Harris, a secular Jew, is curious to find out what lies behind the Hassidic Jews of Brooklyn's Crown Heights. Breaking in is as hard as expected, but she finally finds a family willing to let her in. She spends five years in and out of their lives, in their homes, in the synagogues. The personal accounts are intercepted by chapters of diligent history— Harris leaves nothing out. She leaves Crown Heights religiously unchanged, remaining a secular Jew, but having satisfied her own, and the readers curiosity. Harris took on an unprecedented task. She chose a subject that had not been written about, for there were no books on the Hasidim, Ms. Konigsberg, one of her subjects tells her. Even to secular Jews these fundamentalists were somewhat of a mystery. Accounts of personal discovery add a spice to the story. And even if you don't finish the book shedding all your feminist and modern beliefs, you turn to the last page knowing a lot more about the Hasidim. I know that I will never look at them with the same puzzlement again. New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt But what is special about Miss Harris is her combination of openness and skepticism toward her subject. These qualities in various combinations enable her to ask the hard questions without putting off the people who had taken her into their lives." |
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||