This review was posted on the Intellectual Conservative
by George Shadroui | January 15th, 2010
David Horowitz's tribute to Sarah Horowitz is an act of grace, a recognition that however important his own work, it is no more important than the gifts his daughter gave to those around her who could never aspire to brilliance or success or celebrity. A review of A Cracking of the Heart.
A Cracking of the Heart
by David Horowitz
published by Regnery Press (October 26, 2009)
Hdbk., 256 pgs.
ISBN-10: 1596981032
ISBN-13: 978-1596981034
In his book, A Theory of Justice, John Rawls suggests that a social contract that aspires to be just could only be formed in a state of unknowing: we collectively will only achieve justice by not knowing how and where in that society we might land.
Stripped of our beauty, intellect and power, might we not be a bit more humble and cautious about the kind of society we would create and live in?
Every thoughtful parent faces this dilemma when their child is born. From the moment of conception, there is no way to know who and what their child might be or what challenges they might face. And yet, such parents love with such devotion that they would gladly take on almost any discomfort or pain to protect and assist that child. There will be no perfect justice on this earth, but surely that love is a glimpse of God, if we believe with Saint Paul that God is love in its most pure distillation.
David Horowitz's latest book, A Cracking of the Heart, grows out of this deep affection and love. It is his tribute to his daughter Sarah, who died in March of 2008, without warning, at the age of 44. A tragic occurrence in the most normal circumstances, but Sarah's life was anything but normal.
Born with Turners Syndrome, Sarah Horowitz battled physical ailments of the kind that surely must have broken the hearts of her parents years ago. She was unusually small, was hard of hearing and had various physical deformities that made her feel unwanted and undesirable in an age where physical beauty and talent is so overvalued.
What she lacked in classic physical beauty, however, she made up for with a spiritual grace and determined resiliency that her father can only admire. She wrote poetry, studied relentlessly, chartered her own spiritual journey and endured her hardships with a fierce courage that refused to embrace victimhood in any way.
And she did it while defying, without bitterness or recrimination, the gravitational pull of her father's ideological power. David Horowitz is an icon, a man who has helped lead not one, but two political movements. He was a founder of the New Left, as it has become known, before having his own Damascene revelation in the 1970s and moving steadily toward the right. Moreover, as is well known, he is perhaps the most controversial of right-wing intellectuals, for he has brought to the battle of ideas a contentious and often uncompromising style that was honed in the street wars of the 1960s.
Now imagine this gentle, but tough woman, leftist in her point of view, but deeply private in personality and temperament, forced to witness her father's turbulent and very public intellectual battles. It is perhaps no wonder that she found it impossible to embrace his offers to assist her writing career — how does she measure up, after all, to an author of dozens of books, among them several bestsellers.
She didn't try. She rejected offers of help, and lived her life her way, perhaps grasping what so many of us don't see as we seek to drape ourselves in the accoutrements of material and worldly success — that, really, so much of it is vanity. Sarah, instead, sought to listen — to hear the small, still voices that go unheard in the crass, vulgar world of which we are, alas, all apart. She gave them voice in short stories, a novel, poems, in the essence of her life, in which she reached out to those who were, like her, so often shoved to the margins.
Horowitz's reaction to his daughter's death is not unusual. He relives, as we all do in such situations, those inevitable moments in life when we were too harsh or did not choose our words as well as could have. We are consumed with regret because there will be no more opportunities to apologize or to temper with a hundred acts of kindness or patience those missteps. Horowitz remembers in particular one evening, not long after his conversion to conservatism, when he was having dinner with the family, including Sarah.
Consumed by the controversies in which he had been immersed, he began a tirade against anti-war movements. He went on and on, oblivious to the effect on his sensitive daughter. "But all of a sudden her features came into my view with an excruciating clarity. I saw that her eyes had grown red and liquid, and her face was convulsed as though an immense weight was pressing inexorably down on her. Her expression in that instant was one of such mute and irredeemable suffering that the distress of it has never left me."
Having caused his daughter so much grief stayed with him for 20 years, and though he tried to make it up to her in uncountable little ways and big, he admits here that the pain that he inflicted still causes intense shame. On the other hand, there are many positive exchanges as well, my personal favorite being their shared skepticism of Christopher Hitchens' rantings about religion.
And there is this moving tribute, rooted in Sarah's efforts to help others as an integral part of her own journey. Horowitz writes: "I can take a small satisfaction in the fact that death's victory over my daughter remains incomplete, for though she is gone, she has left me this gift: When I see a homeless person destitute on the street, I think of Sarah, and my heart opens. If there is a criminal shut behind bars, I force myself to remember her compassion, and a sadness shades my anger. If there is a child languishing in need, I think of my daughter in a mud floor hut ministering to the children of the Abayudaya tribe, and my heart goes out to them. These images and their influence are an incarnation of her life after life, her rolling of the soul…."
And so David's tribute to her is an act of grace, a recognition that however important his own work, it is — in the cosmic scope of things – no more important than the gifts his daughter gave to those around her who could never aspire to brilliance or success or celebrity.
Let us be clear, however, that David's gift is no less valuable. In this instance, it is the vehicle that brings Sarah to our attention. He paints with loving and sometimes painful intimacy the struggles she endured, so often feeling ugly and rejected and perhaps forgotten as she sought to live within her physical limits with grace and courage. Yes, he burst out crying when he saw her photo as a child, remembering those precious early years when she looked out trustingly to her parents, all the wonder of life still in front of her.
"Of all the images, the hardest to endure were the ones that had been taken when she was a child, her heart open to a world that had been cruelly set up to put enormous obstacles in her path and eventually to crush her."
I would say this to David, knowing how presumptuous it must seem: Sarah was not crushed by life, as the testimonials to her from many quarters demonstrate. She transcended life with a grace and yearning for understanding that must be called holy.
Perhaps the proof of a Godly life is one that generates sincere mourning and love in good hearts. And we might also contemplate the possibility that this desire to be reunited springs from the deepest parts of our souls, where this world and the eternal connect.
This book is a prayer of remembrance and reconciliation, a prayer surely no merciful or just God will ignore.
A Cracking of the Heart is available on Amazon.com.
