From Publishers Weekly
While best known for his foundational works on the history of Jewish mysticism, the German-born Gershom Scholem's interests were not only wide ranging but so advanced as to still be pertinent in contemporary academic thought. This substantial selection from his unpublished youthful diaries, written when Scholem was between the ages of 16 and 22, is a major addition to his published work: even in his late teen years, Scholem is a full-blown intellectual writing profoundly about important religious and social issues and taken seriously by established scholars like Martin Buber. These entries detail everyday happenings—including Scholem's extraordinarily close friendship with Walter Benjamin—as well as his musings on a wide range of topics, including the new Zionist movement. There is also a passion that conveys Scholem's humanity; when friends were killed in WWI, he wrote: The old men should be shipped off to war. They can kill one another if they want, they shouldn't rob youth of its blood, which is a vicious act against the future of society. These diaries are vital reading for anyone interested in 20th-century Jewish culture, Jewish mysticism and the history of Zionism.
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Review
Scholem's intellectual power was matched only by his powerful feelings, to which his diaries give free rein.
--Jeremy Adler (
Times Literary Supplement )
Scholem is perhaps the single most consequential scholar in 20th century Jewish history, and the undisputed master of the Jewish mystical tradition. He is also a powerfully influential and original figure in the history of modern Jewish thought. His fascinating diaries display the young Scholem as a man of his time: a German Jew in rebellion against his father's assimilationist generation, a passionate and neo-Romantic rebel conspiring to create his own neo-Nietzschean philosophy, a writer of poetry and an avid reader of both philosophy and literature.
Lamentations of Youth will be of tremendous interest both to general readers and to scholars of the history of German Jewry, German cultural history, and the history of religions. This is a fascinating and timely volume.
--Peter Gordon, Harvard University
While best known for his foundational works on the history of Jewish mysticism, the German-born Gershom Scholem's interests were not only wide ranging but so advanced as to still be pertinent in contemporary academic thought. This substantial selection from his unpublished youthful diaries, written when Scholem was between the ages of 16 and 22, is a major addition to his published work: even in his late teen years, Scholem is a full-blown intellectual writing profoundly about important religious and social issues and taken seriously by established scholars like Martin Buber. These entries detail everyday happenings--including Scholem's extraordinarily close friendship with Walter Benjamin--as well as his musings on a wide range of topics, including the new Zionist movement. There is also a passion that conveys Scholem's humanity; when friends were killed in WWI, he wrote: "The old men should be shipped off to war. They can kill one another if they want, they shouldn't rob youth of its blood, which is a vicious act against the future of society." These diaries are vital reading for anyone interested in 20th-century Jewish culture, Jewish mysticism and the history of Zionism. (
Publishers Weekly )
Lamentations of Youth provides intriguing access to a young man's whoosh of ideas in a time when socialism, anarchism, Zionism, modernism, and cubism were revolutionizing the world. Scholem leaps rapidly from this to that, metamorphosing from an uncertain student at Berlin University momentarily thrilled by Martin Buber, to a more confident thinker, gulping down the writings of Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and S.Y. Agnon.
--Barbara Probst Solomon (
New York Sun )
