arts&life
books
NONFICTION
• In 1978, two teenage classic film fans
from St. Paul flew to Los Angeles and
interviewed Hollywood legends Fred
Astaire and Gene Kelly. In the years
that followed, David Fantle (the son of
a Holocaust survivor) and Tom Johnson
interviewed more than 250 stars —
among them Jewish greats Debbie
Reynolds, George Burns, Milton Berle
and more — and have now compiled
these “moments” in Hollywood Heyday:
75 Candid Interviews with Golden Age
Legends (McFarland and Co.).
• For Single Mothers Working as
Train Conductors (Univ. of Iowa Press)
marks Laura Esther Wolfson’s literary
debut that draws on years of “immersion
in the Russian and French languages;
struggles to gain a basic understanding
of Judaism, its history and her place in
it; and her search for a form to hold the
stories that emerge from what she has
lived, observed, overheard and misre-
membered.”
• Jeremy Dauber, a professor of Yiddish
language, literature and culture at
Columbia University, is the author of
Jewish Comedy: A Serious History (W.
W. Norton & Company), an insightful —
and funny — analysis of Jewish humor.
• Although 2018 marks the 70th
anniversary of the birth of the State of
Israel and the creation of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, the sur-
prising connection between Zionism
and the origins of international human
This Narrow
Space
A cancer doctor’s memoir of his years
at Hadassah Medical Center crosses
cultural, religious and political divides.
SANDEE BRAWARSKY SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS
O
ne of Elisha Waldman’s patients at Hadassah Medical
Center’s pediatric oncology department is a 9-year
old Palestinian girl from a village near Jericho. She
has a large tumor on her leg, and after several rounds of
chemotherapy, Waldman and his colleagues determine that
they can’t excise the tumor and have to amputate the leg.
The young girl has a steely determination and understands,
as does her mother, who accompanies her to all her appoint-
ments.
But before they can go ahead, the mother says — through
an interpreter — that she must confer with the girl’s father,
who is serving time in prison. The father forbids the opera-
tion: He says that he’d rather not have a daughter than have
a daughter who is damaged. Despite Waldman’s attempts to
reach out to him via social workers and prison officials, the
father remains unwilling to consent.
Over the course of his seven years at Hadassah, Waldman
must negotiate across cultural, religious, political, ethnic and
class divides, and bridge differences in language, manners
and unstated codes in order to deal with children facing life-
threatening illness. His young patients are Israeli Jews, Israeli
Arabs and Palestinians, some of whom come from places “a
stone’s throw from the hospital” and others from far away;
his colleagues are an impressive mix of Jews and Arabs,
secular and religious, with many immigrants. For Waldman,
working days are filled with moments of awe and deep con-
nection, as well as frustration at hospital bureaucracy and
Middle East politics.
Waldman’s debut book, This Narrow Space: A Pediatric
Oncologist, His Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Patients, and
a Hospital in Jerusalem (Schocken) is about children, as he
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June 21 • 2018
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rights are completely unknown today.
In Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and
Human Rights in the Twentieth
Century (Yale), author, historian and
research scholar James Loeffler uncov-
ers five Jewish activists whose lives
reflect the twists and turns of modern
Jewish history.
• Author Adam Valen Levinson takes
the idea that majority-Muslim countries
are off limits to outsiders and turns
it on its head in The Abu Dhabi Bar
Mitzvah: Fear and Love in the Modern
writes, “for whom things don’t work out according to hopes
and expectations” and about their families and the doctors
who care for them. “And because it’s set in Israel, one of the
most complex places on earth, it’s also about individuals,
communities and even entire nations for whom things don’t
work out according to hopes or expectations.” The book is
also about how his experience influences his own hopes, and
the course of his career and life.
He opens the book with Yehuda
Amichai’s stirring poem “Try to
Remember Some Details,” about stor-
ing up memories in anticipation of a
loved one’s death, when “they have
no life outside this narrow space.” For
Waldman, the narrow space, as he
explains in a telephone interview, is a
moment he strives to find when he’s
in a room with a patient and family.
He listens and watches for an open-
ing, whether a hesitation in a voice or
a glance between parents, through
which he can create a larger space.
His hope is to open an honest con-
versation about what really mat-
ters, that’s not only focused on lab
reports. He’s also comfortable with
long, shared silences.
A book about childhood ill-
ness surely doesn’t sound upbeat. But Waldman writes
beautiful sentences and explains the intricacies of disease
in ways an ordinary reader can understand and not easily
forget. He also writes with candor about his own theological
and spiritual struggles, trying to make sense of all the pain
he sees. Ultimately, he manages to find hope and meaning in
very difficult situations.
Waldman grew up in Fairfield, Conn., where his father, a
Conservative rabbi, served a congregation for 35 years. He
studied theology at Yale before attending the Sackler School
of Medicine at Tel Aviv University and then doing his residen-
cy in New York City. He had long felt the pull to live in Israel
and, filled with idealism, made aliyah in 2007 and began
working at Hadassah.
The author shifts gracefully from his own musings about
medicine, healing and big questions to stories: He describes
the Palestinian children who are late for their appointments
Middle East (W. W. Norton & Company).
Levinson travels to 13 countries under
the backdrop of the Arab Spring and
finds that the accepted narrative about
the region does not always hold.
• The Jewish joke is as old as Abraham.
In the witty compendium The Jewish
Joke (Pegasus Books), Devorah Baum
intersperses jokes by famously funny
Jews from Groucho Marx and Fanny
Bryce to Jerry Seinfeld and Sarah
Silverman while exploring the eternal
question: Why are Jews so funny?
because of the unpredictable amount of time spent crossing
the border (and how they sometimes keep these children
overnight, understanding that they might not be able to
return quickly if needed), the boy wearing a pair of peyos
sewn onto his kippah so that he’d look like the other kids
despite his hair loss, and a 14-year old boy from the West
Bank, who, after months of treatment and conversations
through an interpreter, tells the doctor, after overhearing a
compliment, that he speaks English. When
Waldman asks the boy, one of his
favorite patients, why he didn’t tell
him, the boy replies, “You never
asked.”
He also writes about a young
Bratislaver Chasid, whose extended
family gathers in her room for many
hours as she is dying, singing the
words of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav,
“the whole world is a narrow bridge
and
a the main thing is not to fear.”
Waldman watches as haredi fami-
lies
lie are unwavering in their faith, even
as disease progresses. His colleague
reminds
him that “when religious parents
re
are left with the option of being angry
with
wit God or angry with us, guess who
they pick?” He also writes about making
shivah
shiv visits, some tougher than others.
“As a physician caring for children facing
serious illness, I am granted access to intense, often tragic,
but sometimes beautiful moments in people’s lives. It is in
these human interactions that I see glimmers of the Divine.”
Frequently, he quotes Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel —
who was his father’s teacher at JTS — and other thinkers.
He also writes personally about his adjustment to Israel,
living first in Tel Aviv, where life “runs at full volume.” One
night in early 2009, he began writing the essay that grew
into this book, when he woke up in the middle of the night
and “pages began pouring out” of him, about his patients,
the war with Gaza going on, his attachment to Israel and the
troubles he witnessed around him. He thinks of the book as
a bittersweet love song to Israel.
Over the course of his work at Hadassah, he became
increasingly interested in pediatric palliative care, which
he describes as a “holistic approach to providing support