To the Editor:
I have just read the last sentences of “Perfection” [October 2004] and am rushing to congratulate you for publishing it and thus enabling me to read this wildly funny and heartbreaking fantasy. The story’s amazing originality can be matched only by Mark Helprin’s extreme courage in approaching the unanswerable question raised by the Holocaust, and doing so through the mind of a survivor of Majdanek who, at thirteen, in Yankee Stadium with a baseball bat in his weak child’s hands, proves to himself and to—to whom, really?—that “tsadik Adonai bekhol derakhav,” the Lord is righteous in all His ways; in other words, there is perfection. As a fantastic treatment of that unsolvable riddle, it is one of the most original stories on the inner workings of a haunted survivor I have ever read. Thank you.
Hanoch Bartov
Ramat Aviv, Israel
To the Editor:
Mark Helprin, with all his hyperbolic force of hilarious metaphor, has made us see, through his concoction named Roger, who we are as people in protest against death, in the everlasting praise of His name and the love of that name in its absolute facelessness. Thank you for its publication.
William Proweller
Dunkirk, New York
To the Editor:
A short comment on Mark Helprin’s story, “Perfection,” in Commentary: story perfection in Commentary.
Gerald Fuller
Alexandria, Kentucky
To the Editor:
Thank you, Mr. Helprin, for a delightfully wise story.
Mary Jo and Jim Reading
Grants, New Mexico
To the Editor:
I am a long-time reader of Commentary, and a passionate fan, but what were you thinking? Mark Helprin’s story was pompous, bloated, incoherent, and embarrassing. Please use better judgment.
John DeSola
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania