Not since I read David McCollough's Truman have I felt as I did while devouring Dan Kurzman's
biography of Yitzhak Rabin. Thanks to admirable scholarship and some excellent writing, I was getting to know a man whose life I had admired. This biography stands in the first ranks of its genre. 

While I remember Rabin as the aloof aluf, the man of few words and all of them blunt, Kurzman provides for us a different view. The Rabin-ic traits we may have been tempted to ascribe to haughtiness, he defines as symptoms of insecurity.

As a boy, Rabin was left constantly alone because his mother, Rosa Cohen, was one of the busiest firebrands of the yishuv. She was a Jewish celebrity in the years of the British mandate. An early feminist, she kept her maiden name. She established an agricultural school, demanded that the Mandate institutions hire more Jews, and organized an anti-British military underground, which she commanded. Like many children of celebrities, Yitzhak and his sister Rachel often envied the public's access to their mother's time.

Ironically, as Rabin rose in the Palmach, then in the Army, and served as ambassador to the United States, and twice as Israel's prime minister, he too would be a public figure whose duties kept him away from his children. Rabin carried guilty feelings, not only for his own children, but also for all the subordinates who came under his military command. 

As a general, Rabin's tactics often were brilliant, but their human cost wore on his psyche. A celebrated "breakdown" experienced by the chain-smoking Rabin just before the 1967 "Six Day War" was a case in point.

Kurzman believes that only one who is perceived by the public as being tough towards an adversary will be accepted by that same public as a potential peacemaker. Of course, not all the public accepted Rabin as a peacemaker. Kurzman gives us a minute to minute description of the events leading up to Rabin's assassination at the public square in Tel Aviv now named for him--here hewing more closely to his accustomed role as a journalist than to that of an historian.

If there is a cautionary flag to be raised about Kurzman's book, it is that the author seems to have become a Rabin partisan in describing the former prime minister's political battles with such rivals as Shimon Peres and Ezer Weizman. Rabin is made to look too good, and Peres and Weizman correspondingly bad, in Kurzman's account.

Future historians, with more source material at their disposal, probably will apportion fault and praise among these men more judiciously, with all of them receiving a share of each.
But this to my mind is a small fault. Kurzman's richness of detail, consistency of theme, and especially his understanding of the issues with which Rabin had to deal combine into an excellent biography. I give away many books after reading them. This one is a keeper.