"The countenance of his father": Twenty-five years since the passing of Hadoar author Isaiah Berger of blessed memory

Abstract

I grew up on the front lines of an incessant war between books and clothing, and the books had the better of it. In the bookcases, they reigned supreme, while in the closets the long coats and dresses had to defend themselves against the infiltrations and attacks of the new volumes that multiplied without cease. ¶

This lust for books may have resulted from the fact that my father had virtually no formal education in either Jewish or general studies and attained most of his knowledge not from teachers but through constant, wide-ranging reading. His father, who was a rabbi in Zinkov in Ukraine, passed away when his younger son was a baby. The elder son migrated to Canada, where he succeeded in setting up a business, and as time passed he helped his mother and younger brother come to New York via Canada when my father was sixteen years old. (from Introduction).