When his grandfather first spied his grandmother, 'His clothes, his skin, everything seemed to fit the man too tightly. And this is Chabon's other thread, the passion. Grow your beard for a month.' And then for the rest of the year, there's the trusted weekly formula of kaddish, the prayer for the dead.īut kaddish didn't fill the gap left by his grandmother's death. That's what you need, somebody just to tell you what to do. Jews, his grandfather observes, are 'good at' death and their rituals are comforting. For many Jews of Chabon's generation, there'd be an instant recognition factor of the in-jokes, and his grandfather's disapproval of Jews owning German cars and attitude to the reform synagogue's churchy organ music, which 'erased the advantages' of being a synagogue- instead of a church-goer. The biography of his grandfather is derived from the elderly man's deathbed stories and research, fleshed out with Chabon's and other people's memories, and his imaginings. How much is true is uncertain in a book Chabon has described as a novel, a fictional memoir and 'an autobiography of my imagination'. Von Braun, he hears later, was 'totally freaked out, score one for the hebes'. Von Braun appears not to know who he is and they talk about their mutual passion - a kind of 'intellectual horniness', an uncontrollable shared curiosity about rockets – until his grandfather tells von Braun that Israel is working on a space program for a moon settlement and asks him how he feels about Jews on the moon.

Chabon moonglow review