The Literature Network - Separating the Cheats From the Goats: A Lawyer Thanks God for His Newfound Place in Nature; The Hand Before the Eye

Separating the Cheats From the Goats: A Lawyer Thanks God for His Newfound Place in Nature; The Hand Before the Eye

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From: Forward
Date: 20000317
Author:Furman, Andrew

Furman, Andrew
Forward
03-17-2000
Separating the Cheats From the Goats: A Lawyer Thanks God for His Newfound
Place in Nature; The Hand Before the Eye

The inexorable urge to change one's life is not exactly a theme unique to
Jewish writers. This powerful, perhaps even primal, impulse compels James
Fenimore Cooper's Hawkeye to join the Mohicans in the forest and inspires
Herman Melville's Ishmael to take to the sea just as it drives, say,
Bernard Malamud's S. Levin to seek "a new life" in the Pacific Northwest.
Still, one could make the argument that the distinctively Jewish principle
of t'shuvah, the ...

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