Can’t decide what book to read next? Even if you narrow your choices down to recent books by doctors from Milwaukee, you might still have trouble making up your mind between these three books.
While two of the authors are doctors of philosophy — Stuart Rojstaczer in geophysics and Neal Milner in political science — Abraham J. Twerski, M.D., received his medical training at Marquette University.
All three books deal with issues of family connections and dispersions, work ethics, human strengths and weaknesses, transitions from traditional to modern culture, the role of religion (or lack thereof) in life, aging and death or funerals.
All of them contain elements of humor and pathos. They differ in that two are memoirs and the other is a novel.
Readers would do well to pick up Rojstaczer’s “The Mathematician’s Shiva” if they want to read a gripping, ground-breaking, intelligent novel, sure to become a book club favorite, to remain on best-seller lists and to be recommended by librarians and booksellers for years to come.
The author taught for years at Duke University and now lives in northern California; but he sets his story in Madison, with references to his birthplace, Milwaukee, and flashbacks to the Arctic Circle, Poland and Tuscaloosa, Ala.
Most of the people (and the African gray parrot) in Rojstaczer’s novel, his first to be published, also came from Russia or Poland or speak Polish, Russian or Yiddish.
Alexander Karnokovitch, a professor at the University of Alabama, returns to Madison to attend his mother’s funeral and uncovers some remarkable secrets.
He provides a window onto an essentially foreign world, because most of us rarely associate Jewish ritual and the Yiddish language with Soviet émigré intellectuals and partial differential equations.
Yet, in this poignant and hilarious book, the unlikely cast of characters (with the exception of the Polish speaking parrot and a few humans) comprises prominent academics from around the world, descending on the family and hoping to discover the solution to a baffling problem in higher mathematics.
“The Mathematician’s Shiva” will be available this month in the Penguin paperback edition and on Kindle. The author’s tour will bring him to Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee on Sept. 10 at 7 p.m. (See Coming Events in section one.)
Two memoirs
Twerski is the internationally famous psychiatrist who has written several books. His most recent is “The Rabbi and the Nuns: The Inside Story of a Rabbi’s Theraputic Work with the Sisters of St. Francis,” published in December by Menucha.
Twerski devotees will doubtless enjoy this memoir. So should Catholics and other non-Jews, if they can find it in their local libraries and get past the picture of the elderly rabbi on the cover.
After Twerski decided to pursue a career in medicine, he moved to Pittsburgh, where he directed the psychiatry department at St. Francis Hospital for 20 years and founded and directed the Gateway Rehabilitation Center, becoming a leader in the field of substance abuse and addiction.
During that time, he worked closely with nuns and priests, many of whom had chemical dependency problems of their own, forming close, mutually respectful relationships with them, all the while remaining faithful to his Orthodox Jewish principles and lifestyle.
Readers might smile at how this famous rabbi refers to Catholic clergy as “Father” and “Sister” throughout the book. Although the book deals with some serious issues, Twerski throws in jokes and breaks his story into short, uplifting, perhaps inspiring chapters, essentially case histories of various patients, perfect for reading in short sittings, as on an airplane or beach, and for discussing at the Shabbat table.
Milner, a gifted storyteller, grew up on Milwaukee’s West Side during the 1940s and 1950s. His book “The Gift of Underpants: Stories across Generations and Place” is a memoir published independently by CreatSpace.
The book may bring to mind Jewish institutions any long-time Chronicle reader knew but had forgotten. Milner sometimes amuses and sometimes tugs at the heartstrings.
Milner grew up immersed in an immediately recognizable version of 20th century Eastern European immigrant Jewish-American life, Yiddish expressions and all.
He also writes in short chapters that lend themselves to one sitting, but perhaps, as the picture of the boxer shorts on the cover suggests, one might think better of reading some of them aloud at some families’ dinner tables.
A case in point would be “School Dances and Shul Dances” which contains the sentence, edited slightly for family audiences, “The B’nai B’rith Youth Organization’s main objective was to keep eager [hormonally charged] Jewish kids away from eager [hormonally charged] gentile kids.”
Milner now lives in Hawaii, but has been back in Milwaukee and Florida many times to visit his parents and in-laws or to arrange funerals. Readers of a certain age will find much in this book that is familiar. Younger readers might also find it edifying and entertaining.
Milwaukeean Susan Ellman, MLIS, has taught history and English composition at the high school level and is a freelance writer at work on a historical novel.
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