Page 62 - Sonoma County Gazatte May 2017

Justin Time
Autobiographical Stories from an American Spiritual Master
Book Review:
The Zookeeper’s Wife
by Diane McCurdy
The Holocaust has been examined from myriad points of view. So why not
from a non-human aspect or at least a consideration of how desperately animals suffered along with their human counterparts. The book, The Zookeeper’s Wife, could be called “The Holocaust Lite” because although it deals with one of the most gruesome and despicable atrocities in history, it never becomes graphic, maudlin, or overly sentimental. Animals die, people die, terrible things happen, nature and the human spirit recover, life goes on.
Diane Ackerman’s best seller is technically not a novel. It is listed as non- fiction because this true story is based mostly on the diary of the main character, Antonina Zabinski, along with extensive interviews and archival material. Antonina was truly an animal whisperer. She has a special affinity to relate
to non-humans. As the wife
of Jan Zabinski, the curator
of the Prestigious Warsaw
Zoo she treated her charges
like her children. Perhaps
because of her ability to
soothe and also to predict
the wiles of savage beasts,
she and Jan were able to
hoodwink the Nazi’s and
through subterfuge and
heroism save the lives of
300 Jews. The zoo was
bombed and shelled and the
most exotic and expensive
animals were trucked off to
Berlin. What stock that was remaining was taken out by Nazi’s during a New Year’s Eve night of drunken revelry. In her journal Antonina sees this event as a foreshadowing of the many humans that would subsequently perish. The Zabinski’s talk the occupying powers into letting them start a pig farm on the extensive grounds that had been their zoo. Jan and his staff had permission to pass into the Warsaw ghetto where they city’s Jews had been gathered and impounded to pick up food scraps to feed the hogs. In this manner they were able to smuggle out people and hide them in animal enclosures and tunnels most of whom were then hustled off to safe houses. Antonina was tall and fair, and Hitler’s head zoologist acknowledged and appreciated her Aryan attractiveness which allowed the Zabinski’s some leeway in their dangerous endeavors.
Ackerman is a nature writer and her sensory and visual descriptions of the natural world are lovely. But her digressions are oftentimes distracting. For example, one character has an impressive and apparently important collection of beetles. Thereupon the author will discourse on something like the life
cycle of the insects. As a warning for the appearance of a military inspector, Antonina would begin playing a certain selection on the piano. Then the author fills us out on the whole portfolio of the composer of the piece.
Even though Jan Zabinski was an officer in the Polish army and a professor in Warsaw’s secret university, it is Antonina who is the heart of this story. While The Zookeeper’s Wife does not gloss over brutality, it gives a feminine patina to the triumph of grace.
Even before the first page of Justin Time: Autobiographical Stories
from an American Spiritual Master, J. Jaye Gold’s preface takes us on a multidimensional adventure. In a chronological as well as physical sense,
he transports us to an eclectic assortment of settings from his unique life, or should I say lives. Brought up in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious immigrant family in the Bronx, this street-wise kid begins as a New York hustler and goes on to travel in Afghanistan, Peru, and Algeria. His colorful and unpredictable trajectory leads him to becoming a philosophic “student of life” and eventual spiritual master.
Gold’s straightforward, almost conversational tone and wry sense of humor are incorporated in his delivery of myriad stories from his extraordinary past. On the other end of the spectrum, Gold the spiritual teacher eloquently offers original and profound wisdom that reads like poetry. In this way, Justin Time defies categorization. It’s not memoir, it’s not self-help; it’s philosophic, but down-to-earth.
Gold uses his entertaining tales as a device to challenge his readers to reexamine their own lives. While his perspectives offer a fresh take on situations we thought we had already figured out, he often poses questions that challenge the assumptions and conclusions we have settled for. If you’re looking to stretch your mind, expand your potential points of view, and experience new territory in your own thinking and emotions, this book could be a catalyst for that exploration.
62 - www.sonomacountygazette.com - 5/17