Forty years ago, novelist Herman Wouk wrote a book about his devotion to the Torah and the Talmud called This Is My God, which remains among the freshest and most quietly impassioned religious autobiographies in print today. The Will to Live On is Wouk's follow-up to that work, although its subject--the particular state of the Jewish people in the 20th century--is very different. Wouk promises to tackle all of the biggest subjects here: "the Holocaust, the reborn Jewish State, the prodigious yet precarious American diaspora, and the deepening religious schisms." And his broad-minded reflections on all of these topics--especially his explanation of modern Zionism's rise from the roots of ancient literature and history--are cleanly, forcefully, and respectfully written. Among Wouk's most penetrating insights are his reflections on Israel's struggle, throughout history, with the temptation of idolatry, and his conviction that the Holocaust at last purged Abraham's people of this "near-fatal cancer." The Will to Live On is a risky, wise book that deserves to be called prophetic.


From Publishers Weekly
In the 1950s, sensing a drifting of Jews away from their tradition, novelist Wouk (The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War, etc.), an observant Jew, wrote This Is My God, a classic primer on Jewish belief and practices, to draw some of the curious back. Nearly half a century later, with the American Jewish community concerned with high rates of intermarriage, Wouk brings out this companion volume, a whirlwind tour of Jewish history and sacred texts. It is, he writes, his "view that any hope for our long future [lies] in a massive return to our sources, in faith, in literature, and in history." Despite its brevity, the text succeeds in conveying the large arc of 2,500 years of Jewish history and the grandeur of the Hebrew Bible and prophets, the "exalted challenge" of studying the Talmud and the complex questions of identity facing Jews today, whether in Israel or in the Diaspora. He writes with great love of his tradition and with a becoming modesty about his own impressive scholarship. He draws on incidents from his life to illustrate various points; for instance, regarding the inevitable conflict in the modern mind between rationalism and religion, he describes a meeting between two of his mentors: the philosopher Irwin Edman of Columbia University and Wouk's grandfather, an unworldly Talmudic scholar. Wouk discusses all these issues clearly without oversimplifying them; he confronts head on, for example, the dilemmas facing Zionism in an age when Israel is a military power and a mature, internally divided country. This fine volume deserves to become a classic alongside its predecessor. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
It is indeed impressive that at age 84, Wouk, the famed American novelist, is prepared to revisit the spiritual and historical territory that he first explored in This Is My God. Wouk, a deeply committed and educated Jew, explores the mystery of the survival of the Jewish people through the ages. The three main sections of this book cover the Holocaust, surveys of Jewish sacred and historical literature, and contemporary Jewish life in Israel and the United States. Throughout, Wouk intersperses biographical details that make the reader yearn for a more complete autobiography. Readers seeking an introduction to Judaism will be enlightened by the depth of knowledge here, as Wouk tells a complicated story so simply, and those who have read widely in Jewish literature will be entranced by his deeply felt and articulate sense of the importance of being a committed and believing Jew. Recommended for all collections.-Olga B. Wise, Technical Lib., Compaq Computers Inc., Austin, TX Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
The celebrated author's post-Holocaust living will. What can Pulitzer Prize-winning Wouk add after thirteen novels, four plays, and more? This valedictory, darker than The Hope (1993), includes various wars and remembrances. When the winds of war settled, the Holocaust and Israel provided Jews with ``the energy of guilt and the energy of pride. Both are waning . . . [and Jewry is now] running on empty.'' The destruction of European Jewry is compared to the epic loss of the Second Temple, and the Rabin assassination put in terms of a biblical analogy. Wouk, noting that the commandant of Auschwitz predicted that Western Jews would assimilate and seal Hitler's victory, worries about Jewry's cultural mutiny. The grandchildren of Marjorie Morningstar are demographic icicles. The hope, if not the glory, of a Jewish future may have to be qualitative rather than quantitative. Wouk, urging cultural survival through cultural literacy, devotes his large central section to a brisk but skillful summary of the Jewish classics: all the books of the Hebrew Bible, plus the talmud, the kabbalah, and Yiddish culture. His anecdotal evidence suggests that even secular Jews might enjoy his daily mental workout on the monkey bars of talmudic law. Wouk sees learning and living by Judaism's classics as Jewry's only hope for living on in the diaspora. Despite his dire predictions, his testamentenlivened by memories of Rabin, Ben-Gurion, Bellow, Agnon, and his family patriarchsis more optimistic than ominous. The first and perhaps the last learned American-Jewish novelist begins his Afterword, ``So my task ends.'' Like Moses the Lawgiver in his book-length farewell address in Deuteronomy, Wouk at 84 leaves us with a recap of Torah wisdom and the encouragement to choose survival. Here is the lion of Judah in winter. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.



A lively blend of personal reflections, thumbnail history, and anecdotes...a heritage worth cherishing.



Mr. Wouk's witty and erudite book is as much memoir as it is homiletic.



"This fine volume deserves to become a classic alongside its predecessor..."



"This fine volume deserves to become a classic alongside its predecessor [The Is My God]."



A lively blend of personal reflections, thumbnail history, and anecdotes…a heritage worth cherishing.



"This fine volume deserves to become a classic alongside its predecessor [The Is My God]."


Book Description

Herman Wouk has ranged in his novels from the mighty narrative of The Caine Mutiny and the warm, intimate humor of Marjorie Morningstar to the global panorama of The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. All these powers merge in this major new work of nonfiction, The Will to Live On, an illuminating account of the worldwide revolution that has been sweeping over Jewry, set against a swiftly reviewed background of history, tradition, and sacred literature.

Forty years ago, in his modern classic This Is My God, Herman Wouk stated the case for his religious beliefs and conduct. His aim in that work and in The Will to Live On has been to break through the crust of prejudice, to reawaken clearheaded thought about the magnificent Jewish patrimony, and to convey a message of hope for Jewish survival.

Although the Torah and the Talmud are timeless, the twentieth century has brought earthquake shocks to the Jews: the apocalyptic experience of the Holocaust, the reborn Jewish state, the precarious American diaspora, and deepening religious schisms. After a lifetime of study, Herman Wouk examines the changes affecting the Jewish world, especially the troubled wonder of Israel, and the remarkable, though dwindling, American Jewry. The book is peppered with wonderful stories of the author's encounters with such luminaries as Ben Gurion, Isidor Rabi, Yitzhak Rabin, Saul Bellow, and Richard Feynan.

Learned in general culture, warmly tolerant of other beliefs, this noted author expresses his own other beliefs, this noted author expresses his own faith with a passion that gives the book its fire and does so in the clear, engaging style tha-as in all Wouk's fiction -- makes the reader want to know what the next page will bring.

Herman Wouk writes, in The Will to Live On:

"And so the Melting Pot is beginning to work on Jewry. Its effect was deferred in the passing century by the shock of the Holocaust and the rise of Israel, but today the Holocaust is an academic subject, and Israel is no longer a beleaguered underdog. Amkha in America is not dying, it is slowly melting, and those are very different fates. Dying is a terror, an agony, a strangling finish, to be fought off by sheer instinct, by the will to live on, to the last breath. Melting is a mere diffusion into an ambient welcoming warmth in which one is dissolved and disappears, as a teaspoon of sugar vanishes into hot tea....

Yet here in the United States, for all the scary attrition I have pictured, we are still a community of over five million strong....At a far stretch of my hopes, our descendants could one day be a diaspora comparable to Babylonia. At the moment, of course, that is beyond rational expectation. We have to concentrate on lasting at all...."


About the Author
Herman Wouk began his career as a gag writer for radio comedians in New York City in 1934. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for the classic The Caine Mutiny. Other bestsellers include Marjorie Morningstar, The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, The Hope, and The Glory. He lives in California and Georgetown.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Will to Live On is a major new work of nonfiction, an illuminating account of the worldwide revolution that has been sweeping over Jewry, set against a swiftly reviewed background of history, tradition, and sacred literature.

Forty years ago, in his modern classic This Is My God, Herman Wouk stated the case for his religious beliefs and conduct. His aim in that work and in The Will to Live On has been to break through the crust of prejudice, to reawaken clearheaded thought about the magnificent Jewish patrimony, and to convey a message of hope for Jewish survival.

Although the Torah and the Talmud are timeless, the twentieth century has brought earthquake shocks to the Jews. After a lifetime of study, Herman Wouk examines the changes affecting the Jewish world.