ilana

This is the first book of Kay's that I didn't enjoy. I finished it more out of a sense of duty than anything else, but it didn't satisfy me. I never felt I connected to the characters or understood why I should care deeply about them. I rarely feel Kay's (usually relatively explicit) sex scenes are gratuitous, but I felt the ones in this book were. The most gratuitous was an unexpected and totally unnecessary scene of inexplicable incest between Baerd and his sister Dianora. I guess it was meant to underline the brutality and trauma of the war and occupation of Tigana, but that could have been - and was! - communicated by other means.

While I'm all for complicated and morally ambiguous characters, I just plain didn't like many of Tigana's. I felt a lot of the character development was told rather than shown, and I didn't feel invested in the characters' personal growth.

I've read nine other Kay novels, and read A Brightness Long Ago immediately prior to this. If there's anything that Tigana underscored for me, it was how much Kay has grown as a writer, especially where nuanced and, well, humanist depiction of female characters is concerned. Kay in 1990 was a very different writer than Kay in 2020 - and it's almost shocking how much he has improved in his writing (and inclusion) of female characters. This is both a compliment to his more recent work, and an indictment of it in the case of Tigana.

Edit [12/27/2020]: Also, there was bizarre and unnecessary ~Magical Blackface~. This wouldn't have been ok back in 1990, but it's especially galling to see it in 2020. There was absolutely no need for it. There were characters who could have been black to begin with, including the guy who ended up being in magical blackface, and there are innumerable other ways for the character in question to have disguised himself. My guess is this was an attempt to provide a better, richer sense of the diversity of the world of the book (i.e., it is multiracial/the people of this world have diverse appearances), but it failed utterly, because putting someone in the costume of another culture does not count as representation of that culture. It didn't succeed in its goal, and it's an incredibly bad look in 2020. The depiction of multiculturalism in general was uneven, and like its treatment of gender and female characters, the book failed on this front.

Disappointing. Engagingly written, but draws wild conclusions based on limited evidence, often apparently choosing to follow threads that have limited support from actual scholars.

For instance, Kriwaczek cites Arthuer Koestler as a definitive authority on the question of the Jews of Khazaria, when Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe has been more or less debunked (based, as it is, on extremely thin and limited evidence).

Kriwaczek also seems (for lack of a better word) obsessed with the idea that Ashkenazi Jews are the product of vast numbers of European converts to Judaism, when this is not supported by science or genetics. He goes on at length about veritable legions of Roman, Greek, and other European converts, and to his credit it is true that during the heyday of Rome, there were a great number of “Sabbath-keepers”. But Kriwaczek himself admits that the Greco-Roman converts and their descendents mostly were reabsorbed into the ethnoreligious majority when Rome Christianized fully, and did not remain Jewish.

Kriwaczek likewise claims that “European Jews are almost without exception the progeny or proselytes”, but cites no sources that validate this claim – a declaration that is at odds with the consensus of population geneticists who have conducted studies of ethnic Jews (particularly of Ashkenazim). He asserts that “there is no gene for Jewishness”, and claims that “after several generations, ethnic Hebrews, descendents of Middle Eastern, Roman and Greek converts, German, Slav and Turkic proselytes would have been so intermingled that even modern DNA analysis would be quite unable to separate the different strands in their genetic inheritance.”

This is not in fact the case, and dozens of genetic studies have proven it. (This is such basic knowledge that I can confidently direct the reader to Wikipedia for further reading.) To bolster this claim, Kriwaczek cites something truly incredible. Not a geneticist, nor an historian – Kriwaczek cites Adolf Hitler's Politisches testament: die Bormann-Diktate, stating that “even Hitler, in spite of his psychotically racist anti-Semitism [sic], wrote that ... ‘we speak of the Jewish race only as a linguistic convenience ... from a genetic standpoint, there is no Jewish race”.

It was at this point that I had to stop reading. Not only is the Kriwaczek obsessed with the (false) notion that European Jewry is the product mostly of non-ethnic Jews, he is either ignorant of, or willing to ignore, the many genetic studies that have repeatedly shown that Ashkenazi Jews show far greater genetic affinity with other Jewish populations than with European non-Jews. This is common knowledge and has been affirmed by many subsequent studies at this point (showing that nearly all Jewish ethnic groups are more closely related to each other than to their surrounding non-Jewish populations). It's bizarre and alarming that Kriwaczek is so determined to obfuscate this, particularly since he doesn't cite anything that actually negates it. It's just his repeated assertions of something that has been credibly refuted, again and again and again, as though that constitutes scholarship.

I understand that for many Jews of his generation, particularly those who have personally brushed against the Shoah, acknowledging anything about Jewishness that is tied to genetic inheritance triggers the echoes of Nazi “race science”. I am sympathetic to this, but that sympathy goes only so far, and I cannot extend much sympathy to someone who has written a book, and supposedly done research to support his claims.

I can't even say this is poor scholarship or poorly researched; it is essentially a polemic being presented as popular academic-adjacent writing supported by research, which – to be clear – it is not. I am willing to countenance someone making claims I disagree with, provided they can cite material that supports their arguments. But Kriwaczek appears to have hardly tried.

Critics tend to agree with me:
Review in Jewish Book Council: “a fas­ci­nat­ing and ener­getic, but sig­nif­i­cant­ly flawed, effort . . . The book is pecu­liar­ly doc­u­ment­ed . . . and there are numer­ous mis­spellings and mis­trans­la­tions . . . Sad­ly, one can­not rec­om­mend this book.”

Review in Publisher's Weekly: “Charming but frustratingly rambling . . . the book [is] more of a rumination on a number of related issues than a concise examination of a culture and a language.”

Review in Literary Review : “Indeed, it is hard to see the point of [this] book. [Kriwaczek] opens with some recollections about his post-war childhood in north London and intersperses his narrative with half baked travelogues, yet the bulk is a straightforward, if poorly researched, history of the Jews in Europe.”

A moving account of Michael Twitty's personal journey to explore his ancestry through culinary history, genealogy, population genetics, travel, and his own memories. The book is studded with fascinating (and often disturbing) details about the ingenuity required of enslaved people in the United States to survive, and thrive. The narrative underscored for me and enlightened me in a new way about just how much culture and language from West and Central Africa survived the ravages of persecution and time to remain vital and present in the lives of the descendents of enslaved people today - and the descendents of their ancestors' enslavers - especially in Southern foodways.

A few quibbles: perhaps it's because I bought a mass-market edition, but there were multiple issues that a copyeditor should have caught (creative uses of em-dashes made the structure of some sentences unclear, and required me to re-read them multiple times). The book also could have benefited from an index, but my guess is that the publisher/editor wasn't willing to pay for an indexer.

Still, I absolutely recommend this to anyone interested in culinary history (especially of southern American, West African, and/or Central African cuisines), African American history, and genealogy. Michael Twitty is an excellent writer who goes above and beyond in his efforts to get at a personal truth, and is generous enough to give the reader a window into it.

While the book is now a little out of date (roughly 14 years at the time I read it), this book is a fairly exhaustive, yet accessible overview of the history of the Latin American and Caribbean countries. I found it less accessible and more academic than Mann's [b:1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus 39020 1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus Charles C. Mann https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1545238592l/39020.SY75.jpg 38742], and more accessible and slightly less polemical than Galeano's [b:Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent 187149 Open Veins of Latin America Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent Eduardo Galeano https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1413515169l/187149.SY75.jpg 771351]. (That it's less of a polemic than Open Veins is not necessarily a mark in its favour; it's really a neutral fact, but worth mentioning in the context of Open Veins)I read this book primarily because I wanted more insight into Latin American history and didn't know where to start. I definitely got what I needed from it, and I think it will function well as a jumping off point from which I can more easily ascertain what to read next and how to evaluate potential material.