Chosen By God: A Brother's Journey - Hardcover

Hammer, Joshua

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786864281 ISBN 13: 9780786864287

Publisher: Hyperion, 1999

Synopsis

The story of an unfolding relationship between brothers. It tells of Joshs younger brother, Tony, a troubled teenager who traveled to Israel to work on a kibbutz and fell in with an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect. As Tonys fundamentalist fervor and hostility toward the secular world deepened, so did his estrangement from his family, including his older brother.

About this title

About the Author

Joshua Hammer

Reviews

What happens when two brothers' paths deviate because one becomes a religious fundamentalist? This question is sensitively explored in this absorbing and deeply felt memoir. Hammer is a successful journalist, having written articles for several national magazines and served as foreign correspondent and Los Angeles Bureau Chief for Newsweek. In this, his first book, his journalistic experience is evidenced by a well-written, accessible account and easy-to-read prose. Hammer focuses on his relationship with his younger brother, Tony (now called Tuvia, "the Blessed One of God"), four years his junior. Originally a liberal Jew, Tony was involved in politics as a youth and aspired to an acting career. On a trip to Israel, he became attracted to a Hasidic yeshiva, and on his return sought out a counterpart in Monsey, N.Y., home to several pious sects. He accepted an arranged marriage, produced a large family and devoted himself to full-time study of the Torah and the Talmud. After 16 years of practically no contact, Hammer visited his brother and his family eight times during the course of a year, attempting to understand his brother's decision to renounce the secular world. Hammer scrutinizes the impact of Tuvia's ultra-Orthodox beliefs and practices on their nonobservant parents. He pulls no punches in describing Tuvia's life, including what he sees as his brother's religious extremism and racism, but admires his devotion and wishes him success. This perceptive narrative warmly recounts how, in one case, tolerant acceptance gradually replaced suspicious mistrust. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A deeply affecting family memoir about the author's brother, who, within a matter of months, changed from a kind of hippie lost soul in Jerusalem to a baal teshuva (literally, ``master of repentance'')a newly pious Jew. For many years Hammer, an international correspondent for Newsweek, had been horrified by the increasing fervor of his brother, Tuvia (originally Tony). He was astonished and dismayed by Tuvia's ``humorless certainty, as well as his hermetic existence in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Monsey, New York, where Tuvia and his wife, Ahuva (another BT), had settled to raise a large family in near-poverty, surrounded by like-minded Jews whose ignorance of and disdain for modern culture was sometimes accompanied by ethnic chauvinism and racism. Hammer also watched his brother evolve into a ``stern unbending moralist'' when it came to even the faintest allusion to sex or having fun. Almost all the family income was provided by Ahuva, as Tuvia spent most of his time praying and studying Talmud. Now, Hammer struggles to understand his brothers leap into absolute faith and an ultra-Orthodox lifestyle against the background of their parents divorce, their father's professional crises, and the deaths, all within a year, of their half-sister and two of Tuvia's closest friends. During eight visits to Monsey, he talks at length to Tuvia and immerses himself deeply in Tuvias communal life and rituals even as he persists in his own atheism. He thus slowly comes to appreciate the striving for holiness and family that attracted Tuvia and now provide the guidelines for his life. Near the end of the book, he acknowledges that ``my own impressions of him had evolved through shades of anger, frustration, empathy, and acceptance. Hammer's achievement in this first book is to render a deft, well-written of his brother's ultrapietistic life with a fine balance of journalistic objectivity and the nuanced understanding of a man whose struggle to know his brother has made him something of an ``insider.'' -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this powerful inspection of his relationship with his brother, Newsweek reporter Hammer focuses on the sibling's entrance into Hasidic Jewish society. Having been raised, like brother Tony, in New York City as a secular, nonobservant Jew, Hammer was repelled and estranged for years by his sibling's adopted black-clad life. But the conversion experience intrigued him, and he initiated a rapprochement with Tony, who had adopted the name Tuvia. In turn, Tuvia allowed, warily at first, Joshua to participate in Hasidic rituals at the fundamentalist enclave he moved to in the suburbs. Amid detached yet sympathetic observations of life as regulated by the Talmud, Hammer interlineates scenes from his and Tony's upbringing to convey his sense of what impelled Tuvia's total transformation. Perhaps their parents' divorce and the deaths of two friends and a sister unanchored Tony. Or maybe Hasidism fit Tony's pattern of taking his enthusiasms to extremes, as he had for acting, campaign politics, and Das Kapital. A memoir with understated emotional impact, Hammer's story potently explores the universals of sibling rivalry and religious commitment. Gilbert Taylor

In his first book, Newsweek correspondent Hammer writes about his troubled younger brother, Tony. The two brothers, children of divorce, had always taken different paths. Joshua, the older, more responsible son, had followed in his father's footsteps and become a noted journalist. Tony, always unsure of himself, found certainty and guidance during a trip to Israel, where he became an orthodox Jew. His lifestyle alienated his family, and Joshua lost contact with Tony, now Tuyve, for many years. In this book, Hammer insightfully details their reunion, recounting the time he spent with Tuyve and his large family in an orthodox suburb of New York. We see that Tuyve remains a troubled figureAhe still has difficulty holding down a jobAbut spirtuality provides meaning for him and his family. An insightful look at modern orthodox Jewish life from the inside, this book can be enjoyed by Jewish and non-Jewish readers alike. It is interesting to compare this book to a film on a similar transformation, The Return: The Story of a Young Jewish Couple's Journey to Orthodoxy (Video Reviews, LJ 5/15/99). Recommended for large general libraries and all libraries serving a Jewish clientele.APaul M. Kaplan, Lake Villa Dist. Lib., IL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hyperion
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786864281
• ISBN 13: 9780786864287
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256