ISBN: 0-88739-375-6
176 pp.
Size: 6 x 9
Pub Date: 11/2001
Paperback Original
Price: $14.95
|
Otto, the Boy at the Window
Peter Abeles, Tom Hicks
As sixty-eight year old Peter Abeles confronts his ambivalence over his mother's recent death, he laces together his childhood memories of the prewar Austrian aristocracy his Jewish family belonged to, the rising tide of hate that engulfed them and their decision to flee, and the story of his life in America. In trying to come to terms with his personal history and family, Abeles looks beyond the immediate horrors of the Holocaust and the Diaspora to some of the more subtle effects on the reconstructed lives that followed. He gives a hard, honest account of his upbringing by a cold, demanding father and an embittered, materialistic mother-but he frames that account in forgiveness and redemption, imagining his dead mother as she receives a treasure box of Sefirot, the ten Hebrew words that allow an individual to know Kabbalah, or wisdom.
Peter Abeles and Tom Hicks have produced an intelligent and edifying memoir that has much to say about exile and immigration, about class, money, love and forgiveness. In Otto, the Boy at the Window, they offer readers some hard-earned shreds of Kabbalah.
Review: "Part of the pleasure in reading Peter Abeles' Otto, the Boy in the Window was walking step by step and transition through transition with Abeles' keen insight and gifted eye. From a train ride in Nazi Germany, an education in Chicago, Army service, and business success, Abeles transforms us into willing participants in his life's story. Through his vision we share history and the ability of the human spirit to meet every challenge."
-Rabbi Matthew H. Simon
Bio: PETER "OTTO" ABELES lives in Maryland where he is the owner of FLOM Corporation.
TOM HICKS is the author of Ground Zero: Starting All Over Again With God. He lives in Tennessee.
|
