This book is real­ly two books in one. The first, Lives, con­sists of short sto­ries linked by the premise that life draws from art and poet­ry, not the reverse. The sto­ries in Embers, the sec­ond sec­tion, are minia­ture glimpses of life, usu­al­ly not longer than a page or two, which were inspired by Midrash, scrip­tures, and the sim­ple utter­ances heard by the author in his dai­ly life. The main char­ac­ters of these lit­tle sto­ries range from the matri­archs and patri­archs of the Bible, to famous his­tor­i­cal fig­ures and Shalom Ale­ichem-type char­ac­ters, to some­thing as incon­gru­ous as a desk cal­en­dar! For this read­er, the short vignettes work bet­ter than the longer sto­ries in the first sec­tion. Tak­en togeth­er, the two sec­tions of the book still only tell part of the author’s sto­ry; some of the events he expe­ri­enced in the Holo­caust still can­not be put into words.