"A slim, largely cerebral, yet sometimes deeply engaging autobiography by a Holocaust survivor who has become one of the greatest talmudic scholars of the postwar era ... succinct, intellectually illuminating, and sometimes surprisingly poignant." - Kirkus Reviews

The words of the Talmud were the universe for David Weiss Halivni during his childhood in Sighet, in the Carpathian Mountains. He began his studies before he was five and he became famous for his erudition even before his ordination, at the age of fifteen, in 1943. But when the Nazis crushed the Jewish...