Complicated Jew: Selected Essays

Hillel Halkin is a renowned Jewish writer known for his literary, philosophical, and historical essays on Jewish culture and life. His collection of essays, "A Complicated Jew," offers a profound and intimate exploration of Jewish thought, art, and experience, showcasing his intellectual prowess and cultural insights. Halkin's writing is praised for its elegance, depth, and ability to engage readers on multiple levels.

Format: Hardback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 11 November 2021
Publisher: Permuted Press

Elegant and learned, personal and universal, literary, philosophical, and historical—Hillel Halkin's finely wrought essays on themes of Jewish culture and life are an education in themselves.

Hillel Halkin is widely admired for his works of literary criticism, biography, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as for his celebrated achievements as a translator. Born and raised in New York City, he has lived most of his life in Israel. His complex sensibility, deeply rooted in Jewish literature and history no less than in his own personal experience, illuminates everything it touches. In A Complicated Jew, Halkin assembles a selection of essays that form, if not a conventional memoir, a haunting and intimate record of a profoundly Jewish life that defies categorization. It is a banquet for the mind.

"Hillel Halkin is a master storyteller and a brilliant cultural critic, and in A Complicated Jew he combines both talents to take his readers on an intellectual thrill ride through his encounters with Jewish thought, art, and life. I envy him his lifetime of adventures and am grateful to him for sharing them with all of us."

Dara Horn, novelist and author of Eternal Life and People Love Dead Jews

"I have been reading Hillel Halkin for well on to half a century, always deriving pleasure from his stately prose, intellectual profit from his deep learning, and inspiration from his integrity. I am pleased to think of him as my contemporary."

Joseph Epstein, author of Life Sentences: Literary Essays, Narcissus Leaves the Pool, and Fabulous Small Jews, and former editor of The American Scholar.

"Hillel Halkin himself has always been even more interesting to me than his highly interesting subjects, and here he gives us full access to his adventurous mind, the dazzling range of his."

Weight: 544g
Dimension: 160 x 237 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781642938104