Passover - Book Review


by Joy Cagil - Date: 2006-12-19 - Word Count: 460 Share This!

When I wanted to buy a book for a friend's child and found Passover by David Mamet, I couldn't help reading it myself first, since I have always admired David Mamet's language in his plays and other writings for being so poetic and yet so concise.

This book, too, fits in well with that unique-to-the-writer impression Mamet's readers get. In this tiny book, Mamet relates, on the surface, a slice of life domestic story as a grandmother and granddaughter prepare the haroset for the Seder dinner. While they prepare the dinner, a family drama is uncovered, which becomes the more important story hinting at even more important universal truths.

The story starts slowly with the girl slicing the apples and the grandmother approving her way of slicing. While more ingredients are added, the grandmother tells the girl the meaning of each ingredient according to the Jewish beliefs. The knife the girl has in her hand, although it is not the same knife, becomes the link to the knife a great grandmother once used to save her family during a Polish pogrom. The great grandmother, named Clara, has saved herself and some members of her family as well as her candlesticks, while tricking the enemy.

In my opinion, this is not a child's book, because the core of this tiny book can be grasped better by an adult than a child.

The way the writer starts his story gently and the way he advances it shows his mastery in plot weaving. Just when the reader settles down to enjoy a domestic family scene, he is jolted into a bloody drama, which haunts him even after the book is closed and leaves him thinking of its wider connotations.

The author, David Alan Mamet, was born in Flossmoor, Illinois, on November 30, 1947. He got his education in Goddard College, Vermont and The Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater, New York. Mamet has written over twenty plays, starting with the earlier dark dramas such as Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974), The Duck Variations (1976) and American Buffalo (1977). Then came The Woods (1977), Edmond (1982), Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), Speed the Plow (1988), and The Cryptogram (1994). As a playwright, Mamet mostly worked in Chicago.

Mamet also wrote screenplays for The Verdict (1982) and The Untouchables (1987), and he wrote and directed the movies House of Games (1987), Things Change (1988), Homicide (1991), and Oleanna (1994).

He has won the Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross, a play that dealt with business practices the American way.

Passover is in hardcover of only 53 pages, with memorable drawings by Michael McCurdy and ISBN: 0312131410.

Even though the book may be seen as pertaining to people of Jewish origin, it belongs to everyone, because it is a book about survival, baring man's inhumanity to man.


Related Tags: family, survival, belief, jewish, story, knife, apple, drama, blood, passover, seder, candlestick, pogrom, mamet

Joy Cagil is an author on http://www.Writing.Com/ which is a site for Poetry. Joy Cagil's education is in linguistics. In her background are women's issues, mental health, and visual arts.

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