I had just finished reading The Prime Ministers (Toby Press) and enjoyed every one of its 700-plus pages. Yahuda Avner’s “fly on the wall” account spans the governments of Levi Eshkol (Six-Day War), Golda Meir (Yom Kippur War), Yitzhak Rabin (Entebbe, Oslo), and Menachem Begin (peace treaty with Sadat, attack on Iraqi nuclear reactor, Lebanon invasion), describing sensitive, frightening and sometimes hilarious events, mostly of the kind you will never read in a newspaper.

Daniel Retter’s father, Marcus Retter, z”l, escaped from Vienna to England in 1938 on the Kindertransport. His father’s parents and sister were deported from Vienna to Riga, where they were murdered by the Germans and Latvians. He says that since his father should have been the one asking some of the following questions, the interview is dedicated to his memory.

There is hardly a Jewish child who has not been taught the story in the Talmud (Kiddushin 31a) of Doma Ben Nesina. He was the son of a jeweler who refused to wake up his sleeping father when representatives of the Beis Hamikdash (Holy Temple) came knocking on his door, wishing to buy certain precious stones for the Kohen Hagadol’s breastplate (urim v’tumim).

Of all the challenges to an author and publisher of a book of this genre, none may be as great as offering this brilliantly written, multi-discipline (mathematics, physics, astronomy, hashkafa and emunah) volume to a worldwide Jewish readership, comprised of different backgrounds, hashkafos and education.

Governor David Paterson, Rabbi Marc Schneier, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, Cantor Netanel Hershtik, Rabbi Marvin Hier, Haftorahman, and Shabbos kiddush for more than a thousand men and women – put these all together, add the Hamptons as your backdrop, and you’ve got an unusually memorable Shabbos Parshas Masei weekend.