On The Bookshelf

life were simultaneously narrowed and
intensified."
The Shapiro parents came from
California, brother David from tour-
JUDITH BOLTON-FASMAN
ing in a show in Pittsburgh and Alan
Special to The Jewish News
from North Carolina. Each came to
Beth bearing his own emotional cargo.
n the summer of 1995, Beth
At the core of Vigil is the sadness of
Shapiro was in the last stages of
knowing that this is a family coming
her battle with breast cancer.
together in its original nuclear config-
Vigil (University of Chicago
uration one last time in foreign emo-
Press;, $18.95) is her brother Alan
tional terrain. In the hands of a lesser
Shapiro's chronicle cum memoir of
writer
such a reunion might have been
that emotionally laden time.
marred
by cliche and sentimentality.
Alan Shapiro, a poet and professor
But
Shapiro
is an astute and origi-
of English at the University of North
nal
observer
of
the humanity around
Carolina, first wrote about his sister's
him. He also is unflinching about
death in an essay published in his
where everyone stands with respect to
coming-of-age memoir The Last
Beth's dying. He
Happy Occasion.
writes,
"My broth-
In that book
er
and
I
fell some-
he set out to
where
in
between
examine "how
my
mother's
certain poems
embittered opti-
taught me over
mism and my
time to read my
father's resigned
own and other
fatalism. Like my
people's lives"
mother, we blamed
and "to celebrate
the doctors for
the transforma-
screwing
up so
tive energies that
often,
and
like my
poems can
father
we
believed
engage."
Beth's chances of
Shapiro dis-
survival were never
covered, however,
good, no matter
that poetry did
what
the treat-
not offer him the
ment."
kind of solace he
Although the
needed during
object
of grief,
his vigil at Beth's
Beth
is
portrayed
bedside. When
first and foremost
Beth asked him
as a loving mother,
to write a poem
wife and sister, a
for her as she lay
committed activist and an engaged
dying, he realized "that she was
scholar.
Shapiro also bestows a Jewish
beyond the reach of anybody's love or
brand
of
dignity on his sister when he
kindness, of poetry, of conversation, of
observes
that
Beth's life would be over
relatedness of any kind."
only
when
she
could no longer recip-
In Vigil, Shapiro moves slowly away
rocate
feelings.
from those assertions and sketches
"In our tradition," he writes, "death
aspects of Beth's life in luminous prose
and poetry to detail how deeply broth- means the end of reciprocity, which is
the soul of life. No one should have to
er and sister touched each other in
suffer
being looked at if he or she can-
those final days.
not
return
the gaze."
The vigil itself took place in a hos-
Throughout
this slim book,
pice room in Houston, "a universe,"
Shapiro's
grief
crystallizes
in the small-
writes Shapiro, "in which the terms of
est of moments. At a convenience
Judith Bolton - Fasman is the book
store he articulates, "I'd think how
editor for our sister publication the
much I must have looked like any

I

"Baltimore Jewish Times."

other customer on just another day of
errands, and not someone whose sister
was dying just a mile down the road."
Perhaps what is most eloquently
conveyed in Vigil is that Beth's
indomitable spirit will never die. Even
after a rabbi becomes flustered over
her questions about the afterlife, she
eventually realizes that she will live on
through her daughter and her good
deeds. This lovely and affecting book
confirms her belief.
Alan Shapiro gracefully concludes
the volume with six poems that evoke
his sister in life and death. These
poems, as well as the prose in Vigil,
derive their "transformative energy"
from Beth Shapiro's life and lore.

The Measure
Of Our Days'

ALAN M. SCHWARTZ

provide a crash course in pathology
conveyed in an engaging, dramatic
style often worthy of a novelist.
The book's final case history and its
epilogue movingly relate the cancer
treatments of Dr. Groopman's best
friend and his mother. Moreover, as he
explains in his introduction, it was the
untimely death of his father, a man
"who taught me how to love," that
motivated him in his work and his
writing.
He also makes clear the importance
of his own Jewish background, the
strength and wisdom he draws from
its traditional texts and rituals (the
book's title is derived from Psalm 39),
as well as his parents' suffering during
the Holocaust.
The Measure of Our Days is as mem-
orable as the lives it portrays. In sug-
gesting new ways to consider the mean-
ing of a life, Jerome Groopman illus-
trates the power of medicine and of
faith — as well as the limits of both. 111

Special to The Jewish News

" s cience without religion is

lame," wrote Albert Ein-
stein. "Religion without
science is blind."
This recognition of the inter-
twined, indispensable relatiOnship of
modern science and faith stands in
stark contrast to conventional
assumptions about their incompati-
bility.
In The Measure of Our Days
(Viking; $23.95), his thoughtful,
well-crafted account of tragedy.and
transcendence in the treatment of
the terminally ill, the author, Dr.
Jerome Groopman, a professor at
Harvard Medical School and an emi-
nent cancer and AIDS researcher,
lends valuable new insight to the
subject.
Groopman's writing is such that
the reader — like the author him-
self, who so movingly conveys it all
— cannot help but get caught up in
the wrenching, dispiriting tragedies,
as well as the occasional jubilant vic-
tories, of real suffering people,.
Taken together, these narratives

Alan M. Schwartz is director of
research for the Anti-Defamation League
in New York City.

NEW BEGINNINGS

AT LIFE'S END

the
measure o

Editor's- Note: For Dr. Groopman's

discussion on genetic testing for
the BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 breast
cancer genes, which disproportion-
ately affect Ashkenazi Jewish
women, see the Feb. 9 issue of The
New Yorker.

2/13
1998

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