A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Enlightenment [antikvár]

EDITOR'S NOTEOnly time and more wit will tell, but for now it seems as if Lenny Ravich is 2lst-century Israel's Mark Twain or Will Rogers. Though Twain and Rogers were not psychotherapists, their witticisms were often therapeutic, like verbal salves and unguents. Though no riverboat dandy or dust bowl cowboy, Lenny's visceral wit is sheer balm to the human spirit.The pithy observation often has that effect, rather witty or wry. In Lenny's hands, the pith is simultaneously both wry and wittywith the intent to heal. Sometimes, however, it is when the wry irony of memory stands starkly alone on the page that we can be reduced to pain and not laughterwhen it is suggested to us that the origin of wit may very well be pain. An example to hand is when Lenny recalls a lesson from his mother:"My mother used to teli me stories almost every day. One was about the Cossacks nearly raping her, and the other was one that binds Jewish boys and their Jewish mothers into a very unusual life-script. She used to teli me about a little boy who always told his mother how much he loved her."Years later, when he became a young bachelor, he met a girl and proposed marriage. She said she would marry him only on one condition. He must take a knife, go home, cut his mother's heart out, and bring the heart to her. That way, the girl would be sure that he truly loved her. So the young