SOURCE: "Lev Shestov: Athens and Jerusalem," in Commonweal, Vol. LXXXV, No. 22, March 10, 1967, pp. 661-62.

Cohen is an American novelist, critic, editor, and author of nonfiction works dealing with Jewish theology. In the following review of Athens and Jerusalem, he concludes that Shestov is "innocently, marvelously, accurately on target about the human condition. '

Lev Isaakovich Schwarzmann, the son of a prosperous Jewish merchant of Kiev, chose early to be known by the pseudonym, Shestov. Shestov concealed the man Schwarzmann; the passionate, inflammatory prose of Shestov's French and Russian critical and philosophic writing, though it seems autobiographical, reveals nothing about the man Schwarzmann, though it tells us ever so much about the pseudonymous person, Shestov. Indeed, reading Athens and Jerusalem, the last work Shestov was to complete shortly before his death in 1938, one is struck by the fact that Shestov is to Schwarzmann no less a device of revelation...