Halkin Puts Everything in Its Place

Frum iz a galakh, erlikh iz a Yid.“A priest is pious, a Jew is [or ‘must be’] honest [or ‘honorable’].”

Collections of essays are never popular with publishers, especially nowadays when even the most educated people “write” more than they read. Collections usually lack the coherence of a start-to-finish book. And there are few living writers whose ruminations on this and that subject deserve to be collected. A Complicated Jew: Selected Essays is on both counts a rare exception, because Hillel Halkin is one of a kind.

Born in Manhattan just before the start of World War II, son of a distinguished professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Halkin’s beginnings were not atypical for post-War New York. He was schooled at the Ramaz Jewish Day School, was called to the Torah as a bar mitzvah at the synagogue at JTS where he davened with his father on Shabbat mornings, graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, and took a BA in English at Columbia, after which he studied for a year in England and then did a short stint in graduate school back at Columbia. He soon left the academic path and went on to spend most of the 1960s in sixtyish ways: developing through travel a Whitmanesque love of America; participating in the civil-rights movement and teaching for a year at a black college in Alabama; buying 150 acres in Maine on which he intended to live in a log cabin. But in the aftermath of the Six-Day War and newly married, Halkin said goodbye to all that and made aliyah with his wife Marcia in 1970, soon taking up residence in a house he had built for them on a one-acre plot in the romantic hilltop village of Zichron Yaakov.