AMANUENSIS

Copyright Jack Cohen, 2009

Elders of Zion Press.

Reviewed by Adele Rubin

Jack Cohen, today a resident of Netanya and a VIP of AACI, describes in his autobiographical novel, Amanuensis, growing up in the east end of London - a poor and deprived area - in the 1950s with parents who are working class immigrants from the Ukraine and Holland.

In spite of all this and the severe anti-Semitism the family faces, Jack goes eventually to Cambridge University and becomes a professor of pharmacology in America and Israel.

The underlying theme and the motivation for writing is a family secret kept from the protagonist who only discovers the truth as an adult.

The writer mixes fact and fiction (scenes from the Holocaust). Many writers use the theme of loss. I just read Paul Auster’s Invisible, where the writer is influenced by the death of a young brother.

It would have been interesting to learn more of how Jack succeeded in spite of the difficulties and his career as an adult.