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Book Review  by Ida Nasatir

Even the Night by Raymond Leslie Goldman
January 27, 1950—Ida Nasatir book review—Even the Night by Raymond Leslie Goldman—Southwestern Jewish Press, page 3 : For most of us life often becomes more than a challenge. Dreams die unborn, nameless sorrows plague us, valid worries are eternally gnawing at us, and it seems that the world and life in general is cold and metallic, and we have every reason to feel "sorry for ourselves."  AT such times, it would be wise to get a copy of Even the Night and slowly, carefully read its contents. For Mr. Goldman has written out of the stuff of life, an autobiography that proves there is victory over pain.  On his fiftieth birthday, Mr. Goldman, a successful writer, decided to pause from his labors, and write an account of his life. That birthday was in a way a remarkable one. The most remarkable thing about it was that he ever lived to be fifty. For there were a dozen times in that half century when the onlooker would not have wagered a street car transfer on Mr. Goldman's chances to recover from his many terrible misfortunes. His first memory is that of lying in bed, a victim of infantile paralysis. In addition to that crippling disease, when he was in the eighth grade, he began to grow deaf, which became progressively worse with the years. At the age of 26 his wife died, leaving him with a small son. A year later Mr. Goldman came down with the severest type of diabetes. He writes about all the details of his illnesses. The play by play account of learning to crawl on his knees, of learning to walk with braces, and then without them, with all of the terror, and pain, and shame that accompanied it, is set down with such lurid and vivid exactness that they are almost as painful to read as they were to experience. But all this is by the way. The author's real problem was how to adjust emotionally and psychologically to these happenings in his life. How to fight down the tendency to hide, to cower and above all to give up.  Mr. Goldman makes painfully real what it means for a young man who could and who liked to swim as he did, to appear before others at the beach with legs as thin as "broomsticks;" he tells what it means to be chosen to write and read the class poem at graduation, yet to be terrified to walk to the center of the platform in the manner of a cripple before the eyes of thousands. It was with these attitudes that the author had to struggle. He writes also of being a Jew in a Christian world, which becomes one more threat in his tapestry of pain, bereavement, eternal struggle—but eventually of self-conquest and happiness.  This is a healthy book to read, for the reader will long remember Mr. Goldman's painful step by step progress from a world of tears and troubles, to one of promise; his courage that would let neither affliction nor self-pity mar the richness of a full life.