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The Ebb and the Flow
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by:
ISBN:
0-7414-2007-4
©2004
Price:
$20.95
Book Size:
5.5'' x 8.5''
, 355 pages
Category/Subject:
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General
The Ebb and the Flow is the literary voyage of a young man’s life. Through these memoirs of hope, understanding, pain, and struggle, he rises to find forgiveness and love.
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Abstract:
The Ebb and the Flow is more than the memoirs of a young man seeking to find himself. It is an echo to a time when childhood gives way to callow youth. It is a book of pain, discovery, loss, joy and happiness.
We share his defeats and victories, encounter his despair and shattered hopes, his yearning to be loved. We pray with him. And after his expectations are shattered he finds fulfillment in prayers and voice as he sings the Jewish liturgy.
Come, take this compelling voyage. It will open up landscapes long unseen and now revisited.
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Customer Reviews
Review of The Ebb and the Flow
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08/15/2004
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Reviewer:
Vivian Vican
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The Ebb and the Flow, the second in a series of autobiographical memoirs by Rabbi Harold F. Swiss, is the story of a young man coming of age in the 1930s and 1940s. Between the lines of his own life story flows the undercurrent of universal feelings, emotions, awakenings and revelations which brought me to both tears and laughter.
Continually cast aside and abandoned by his mother, the incident of the white gloves is particularly moving as Harold realizes the significance behind his brother's gift is that he is truly loved and admired by others in his family.
The story is a stream of emotions, from the pure joy of singing prayers with Mrs. Schroeder to the prejudice and hatred faced in the army, from the elation of learning to play baseball as an adult (and realizing he could be good at it) to being swindled at the hands of Mr. Allison, the publishing agent.
But I found most moving and insightful his view on war:
“On August 6, 1945, [World War II] did end! What ended it changed the entire world in an instant. . . .
Did God decide to do what He did with Sodom and Gomorrah? To destroy the world He created? Where was Abraham to speak up for justice? No, we had no Abraham because it was now not God who was intent on destroying millions of innocent people. We were the gods Yes, it was man. . . . We pay tribute to the power of man to take it within his right to decide that the people had to die. All of them. Their buildings shattered, their earth scorched, the faces of the people blown from their bodies, melted in the first blast of atomic energy. The bomb came as a thud. Then as a triangular cloud. Windows were shattered. The ground beneath began to buckle. The doors broke open. The sky darkened. In the distance_a mushroom cloud. Soon the heat burned everything in sight. It grew wider and wider over the skies. In a moment, thousands died_somebody's wife, husband, child. Animal, horses, cows, birds. The grass, vegetation, the trees. All the land, dead, gone up in the smoke of Hiroshima. All at the moment of the explosion. An entire city crawled to the ground, entombed in the blinding white heat of the earth, heaving convulsively, struggling to remain alive.
Those who did remain alive were doomed to die of pain, disease and nuclear fallout. The newspapers printed gruesome photographs of people stumbling through the wreckage, the buildings lying in heaps of iron and bricks, houses blown to bits, thousands lying naked on one another, body parts strewn all over the land, heads separated from bodies, all scattered over the once_beautiful city of Hiroshima. There were photos of people running like hunted and scared animals, their mouths open, their clothing scarred in tattered rags, looking, searching, floundering with their hands flailing in mid air, shrieking, falling and rising and falling dead. Many of these people wanted to die and hoped that God would be so kind to cause them to fall into eternal sleep rather than to bear this pain and confusion.
But was this the end? No, not the end. The next day, the once beautiful city of Nagasaki was a victim of the same punishment as Hiroshima.
Yes, the order of life was now no more. The war was over. No cheering. No parades. A society dead, defunct. Its earth soaked with the blood of the innocent was to be the fertility of the future. . . .
History, in its inexorable march toward the future, will remain to be formed. War brought horror to the world… The worst, the very worst of human nature, demonstrated the ability to terrorize the entire world… I thought of the horrors I witnessed in the army during the height of the war… and wondered if we conquered the menacing disciples of hatred…”
Rabbi Swiss touches us all in The Ebb and Flow. The undertow of emotions sweeps us along, dashes us against the shore, then raises us to the crest of the tide.
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