NON.IF'ICTION

`The Bible As It Was'

By James L Kugel
Harvard University Press, 680 pp.,
$35.00.

What made the Bible the Bible?
That's not a pointless question.
After all, the Hebrew Bible is a good
deal more than the stories, laws,
proverbs, songs, and other material
that it comprises. It wouldn't be the
Bible that we know, the basis of
Judaism and a crucial building block
of Christianity and Islam, were it
not for the way its text was received
and accepted throughout the genera-
tions and for the authority it was
accorded. And its acceptance and
its authority would have been
impossible without a longstanding
and ancient tradition of interpreta-
tion.
Harvard professor James Kugel has
attempted to reconstruct the oldest
interpretations of the Bible in order
to show the modern reader how the
text was viewed by its first critical
readers, who lived from about the
second century C.E. well into the
era of the Mishnah and of the Baby-
lonian Talmud.
With a remarkable display of eru-
dition, Mr. Kugel ranges far and
wide through the Midrash, the Dead
Sea Scrolls and other sectarian
works, the Talmud, the Church
Fathers, the apocryphal books, the
ancient translations into Greek and
Latin, and dozens of other sources.
He traverses the Torah story by story,
from the Creation to Moses' final
address to the Jews. Accompanying
each section is a wealth of commen-
taries, many of which set off sparks
of disagreement with each other and
with the modern temper.
Why did God choose Abraham to
found the chosen people? Why was
Lot's wife turned into a pillar of
salt? Why did Moses have a speech
impediment? These and many
more questions occurred to the
ancient interpreters, and Mr. Kugel
presents them all, with intriguing
answers.
This book is an indispensable
guide to the best of Jewish and
Christian thinking on the Bible. Not
incidentally, it is also a painless
introduction to the best of Talmudic
and rabbinic literature.

— Jonathan Groner

6/12
1998

82

EORGE LANG

,RAAIStilSNAZAC

Nobody Knows the
Truffles I've Seen'

happens to this man is given equal
attention and recounted with a weird
lack of affect, let alone passion.
His story gets downright creepy
when he writes about what must have
been devastating emotional experi-
ences. He devotes a single page to his
reaction upon learning that his parents
were immediately gassed when they
arrived at Auschwitz; his attempts to
reclaim his family home and posses-
sions get considerably more space. He
mentions the death of an adult daugh-
ter in passing, and long after it would
have occurred in the chronological nar-
rative. In fact, four children from two
marriages barely figure in the story at
all.
As an introduction, George Lang
lists four reasons to write one's mem-
oirs. In his case, they weren't enough.

— Ellen Jaffe-Gill

•

By George Lang
Alfi-ed A. Knopf 384 pp., $28.95.

George Lang's life sounds as if it
would make good fodder for an auto-
biography. Caught up in the Holo-
caust after a happy childhood in rural
Hungary, he escaped from a Nazi labor
camp and survived until the Russians
took Budapest by masquerading as a
member of the local Fascist militia. He
was then imprisoned as a war criminal
by the Russians until people that he
had helped in the weeks before libera-
tion came to his rescue.
Mr. Lang arrived in America the fol-
lowing year. He had abandoned a
career as a violinist, and, one job at a
time, became a restaurateur and what
,,
today we call an "event planner,
putting together several renowned
theme restaurants • and numerous high-
profile parties in New York and around
the world.
In his 70s, he is able to recount a life
chockablock with luscious food, great
art and music, and sparkling conversa-
tions with the witty and famous. He
has met every challenge with humor,
shrugging off disappointments and
reveling in successes.
Should be an inspiring yarn, right?
Sorry. In entirely too many pages of
mannered, inexpert prose (studded
with puns .on the level of the tide), Mr.
Lang turns the venerable House of
Knopf into a vanity press with this
oddly flat memoir. Everything that

`Hotel Bolivia'

By Leo Spitzer
Farrar, Straus er Giroux, 174 pp.,
$27.50.

After Adolph Hider annexed Austria
into the greater German Reich in
1938, Jews scrambled to escape the
impending danger by finding any
country that would accept them. Long
lines and complicated visa procedures
frustrated the efforts of refugees
attempting to flee. Most countries
refused to accept refugees, so Jews
went wherever they were accepted,

some as far as China. In "Hotel
Bolivia," Leo Spitzer describes the
journey of his family and other Austri-
ans, Germans and Poles to South
America, settling ultimately in Bolivia.

Exploring the
connection
between memory
and how people
shape their
culture.

These lifelong city-dwelling Jews
were struck with the pioneer spirit and
tried to start a farming community in
the jungle. Unfortunately, the effort
failed and the venture went bankrupt.
When the war ended, most of the
refugees moved on to places like the
United States, England and Israel, or
even returned to their homes in
Europe. These days, hardly more than
1,000 Jews remain in Bolivia.
What makes "Hotel Bolivia" unique
is that Mr. Spitzer explores the connec-
tions between memory and how peo-
ple shape their culture. When Mr.
Spitzer's family relocated to South
America from Vienna, they created
their sense of home away from home
through their memories of Austria. By
living with other Europeans, eating
Austrian foods and learning about Aus-
tria in school, the exiles could main-
tain some feeling for the place they
used to call home.
Mr. Spitzer demonstrates the power
of memory to affect one's sense of cul-
ture in two ways. First, his family visits '
Austria in 1978, and even though they
came from the same country, the
Spitzers feel like strangers compared to
other Austrians presumably because
they have different memories of the
land.
In contrast, when Mr. Spitzer meets
other Jews who share the Bolivian
experience, he feels the bonds of these
common memories. A new cultural
background emerged from those Jews
who lived in Bolivia during the war
years.

— Steven H Pollak