5 comments about Messages From My Father: A Memoir.

1. Humorist, journalist, food maven, the author of numerous books and a writer for The New Yorker, Trillin brings his blend of self-deprecating humor and thoughtful observation to this affectionate memoir of his father.

   Abram Trilinsky emigrated to St. Joseph, Missouri, from Russia at the age of two. When his wife hinted at a trip to Europe, his terse response was, "I've been." He was resolutely a mid-western American, a man who changed his name to Abe Trillin, and at the end of his life exhibitted the only prejudice his son ever observed - an impatience with "refugees," by which he meant people who clung to the language and customs of their country of origin.

   He was a stubborn man, like most of his family, described by his wife as "Mules!" "I sometimes imagined my father as swearing off things just to keep in practice," his son observes.

   He never swore although he collected colorful curses - "May you have an injury that's not covered by workman's compensation." His honesty was absolute - when a child turned 12 he paid full price at the movies even if he looked 9.

   He was unassuming. When Calvin was in high school, his father opened a restaurant and took to wearing yellow ties. "He said something about how most people don't stand out from the crowd, and how it helped to have a sort of signature." This seemed embarrasing to his adolescent son. "What was so great about having someone say, 'Oh, yes, Abe Trillin - the guy with the yellow ties'?" But years later at Abe's funeral, he's touched by how many friends asked for a yellow tie as a remembrance.

   His father was not a talker. One of his favorite jokes concerned a Jewish actor who finally gets a real part playing a Jewish father. The actor asks his father why he seems disappointed. " 'Of course I'm proud of you son,' " the father says, " 'But we were hoping you'd get a speaking part.' "

   Calvin writes, "What strikes me as odd now is how much my father managed to get across without those heart-to-hearts that I've read about fathers and sons having." Without it being talked about, Calvin knew his father was ambitious for him. "It was a given in our family that my father was a grocer so that I wouldn't have to be."

   One of their biggest arguments concerned Calvin's joining the Boy Scouts. He hated Boy Scouts but Abe regarded it as essential to American boyhood, a necessary step on the way to Yale, Trillin senior's university of choice, an idea he'd gotten from a novel read as a boy - Stover At Yale.
   
   Calvin went to Yale. Yale launched him out of Kansas City, never to return (also as Abe expected). The grocer's son would never be a grocer.

   In one (somewhat unrealistically) ingenuous chapter Trillin goes to a dinner of prominent writers and realizes that they all went to Ivy League schools as he did. Was there a connection? (Puleeeeze). "For the first time, I realized that my father's vision of how all of this was supposed to work out might not have been as simplistic as I had always assumed."

   This slim volume is deeply captivating and affecting. His father emerges as a man of indomitable will, will so strong he imposed it simply by being. He was a man who could afford to be easy going and funny, all the while adhering to a plan of grand ambition which embraced cross country automobile trips to broaden the horizons of his children and simple pronouncements: "You might as well be a mensch." Much of the book's power lies in the author's recognition of himself as his father's ambition fulfilled - a successful American who does his best to "be a mensch," a real human being.




2. I don't know anyone in the Trillin family personnally, but I recognize them very well. I learned something I didn't know--that Jews landed some place other than Ellis Island. As a father myself, I appreciate what Abe did for his son. So did Calvin.



3. This book was a disappointment to me. Although it is only a slight volume I found it to be heavy going and very uninteresting. Avoid.



4. Such is Calvin Trillin's caliber of work you don't realize how good he is, and he is really good. This book touched me deeply; Mr. Trillinsky was not an emotional man and given to the touchy feely sort of stuff so espoused these days, but he gave his son everything he would need to have a fulfilling life, one of the main components being a deep, abiding and unconditional love; how lucky Mr. Trillin was.
   
   My father was an evil and stupid man who never learned from his mistakes and is now reaping the whirlwind; I believe Mr. Trillinsky would have I.D.'d him in five minutes flat, and would have had mercy on him, much more than I can manage now. If you are raising a child, or trying to figure out what in God's green earth happened to you during your childhood, read this book. Mr. Trillin's artistry is a delicious extra.
   
   I have read "Remembering Denny" and it has seared a place in my mind since. It explained so much to me. This is another book that is going to go on my mental bookshelf, probably till the end of me.



5. This is a lovely endearingly funny book. I read it in just an evening but I'm sure it's a book I'll go back to in the future.

5 comments about Into the Tunnel: The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943.

1. Marion Samuel was eleven years old when she arrived at Auschwitz in March of 1943, she was gassed to death the same day and her body burned in the crematorium. He ashes were thrown into a pit with hundreds of others and then covered over with soil. Their is no marker over where she died.
   
   But who was this child and what was her crime that she should be treated so. She came from a lower middle class family from West Pomerania, near the Baltic Sea where the German-Polish border is today. At the age of six she was a witness to Kristallnacht and forbidden to go to the German Public School she had attended for the last three years. He family lost their business and both her parent's became "unskilled" factory workers. Marion was able to go to a "Jewish" school for two more years, before those were shut down. For the last years of her life she lived in a one room ground floor apartment off an alley. Since her parent's were away each day, she had to fill her time as best she could.
   
   How did she view the world she lived in? Did she wonder why she and her parents were being treated the way they were? Did she have any understanding that she was being punished for a random act of birth? At least we know she was on the same train as her father (who lasted sixty one days in the camp) when she was "evacuated". Thankfully, the horrors at the end for this little girl were tempered by the comfort of a parent.
   
   Hopefully, the people that ordered her death, and carried it out, suffered for what they did.



2. This is a book could've been written by Sophie Scholl, from the White Rose Movement, from heaven-almighty.
   
   I cannot bequeath the tragic nature of how I came to understand this "statistic" but in all due seriousness, why not a statistical analysis of the nearly 2 million dead or wounded, you have to remember, that Iraq and Aftanistan, although it maims, scars and is a horrifying Nazi conquest, particularly Iraq, the Holy Roman Empire lives on, just as the slaughter continues, for all Buddhist protesters in Tibet, and anyone with half a brain, can figure this out: this book is a euphemism for the hatred that sparks wars and all sorts of pogroms, including that of being disabled, very similar to being Jewish, in Nazi Germany.
   
   I highly hated Hitler, until he dies, briefly, very briefly with enough time I have to commute across the internet to show my mother this beautiful book, but I hate him present-tense, as I have no money, to buy it for her.



3. this was a very moving book. I kept thinking during the book. how could anybody murder 1.5 million children and where were the alleged good people. why did not our country do a great deal more to save the jews of europe. the USA could have saved every jew in germany, austria and czechoslovakia if the state dept. had not been run by anti-semetic officials.



4. One of the abiding insights that comes through in Goetz Ally's Into the Tunnel is just how efficient bureaucracies can be at transforming vibrantly alive human beings into impersonal statistics on official forms. In their extermination program, the Nazis, with an eerie fidelity to record-keeping, felt the need to document every detail of the lives they were destroying. That's why Aly is able to trace the unhappy fate of the beautiful little girl, Marion Samuel, who is the protagonist of this unhappy tale.
   
   Such exercises are important; they help to keep memory alive. But Aly's book is more of a model of historical research than a sustained biography that captures who Marion Samuel was. This is as it must be. Nazi documentation records dates when the Samuel family loses its business, moves from one locale to another, and is rounded up for deportation to Auschwitz, but little else. There are few photographs left, and family memories on both Cilly's (Marion's mother) and Ernst's (her father) side have dimmed (or were outright obliterated by the Holocaust). So what we have in this book is a lot of data that leaves us with the sinking awareness that the 12-year old Marion simply disappeared in a wide ocean of bureaucratic files and forms even before she was murdered and incinerated at Auschwitz.
   
   Still, we get glimpses of her, and those glimpses are all the more poignant for being so incomplete. One of her schoolmates recalls that in 1938, a full five years before her murder, an 8-year old Marion was already feeling the burden of the Nazi horror. She remembers (p. 82) that at one point a near-hysterical Marion blurted out her fear that Jews were disappearing into an ominous tunnel. We also know that at the final roundup, Marion was separated for three full days from her parents, and sent to a detention warehouse full of equally parentless children. Marion's mother, Cilly, was sent on to Auschwitz and quite likely was immediately murdered. Marion and her father Ernst were reunited in the same transport that took them both to Auschwitz. One can only imagine the forlornness Marion experienced before she was reunited with her father for their final journey into the tunnel. Both were murdered a week later.
   
   It's good that Aly's work allows us to know something of a child, unspeakably murdered before she barely had a chance to live, who otherwise would've totally disappeared.



5. I'll read this book over and over, I am sure - three times already in a day and a half. The first time I tried to focus on the historical scholarship and impeccable method, but was distracted by thoughts of "But why? Why? It doesn't make sense. They were Germans too."
   
   Again I read it, and was arrested this time by the mechanistic system set up by the Nazis in what was really quite a short time. Every Jew's (and every other citizen's) address was on a card somewhere - every detail of their life was a part of a huge network by means of which all people of a certain category could be swept up with little or no warning with chilling efficiency, and sent away. Then their property was listed, valued, distributed to 'more deserving' citizens, and the state itself recovered every last drop of value from those it had discarded - down to retrieving their security deposits from the gas and electricity companies to be paid into general revenue. Those companies even printed for their own use forms for particularising the amount of the deposit, any unrecovered bills, and any remainder to be sent to the State.
   
   Then, at the third attempt little Marion and her family took all my attention, despite my efforts to resist them, and I wept. This book is quite accessible to any general reader, and Marion Samuel, thanks to the efforts of Gotz Aly, could take her place beside Anne Frank in the lists of books for young folk to read, for slightly different reasons. Anne Frank shows us her own growth and maturity, as well as the effect on others of the horror outside their hiding place. Marion's story is not in her won words, but it shows starkly the power a state apparatus can gather to itself and use to crush parts of its population it takes a dislike to. Would that there had been more of the kind of German described in "Into the tunnel" when a young girl was told forcefully by her father that the sight of Jews being deported was something that struck home at all other Germans, because it could be Catholics like their family next.

4 comments about The Secret of Priest's Grotto: A Holocaust Survival Story (Holocaust).

1. I visited the Priest's Grotto in 1990 and found the story local cavers told us fascinating. However it took the amazing detective work of Cris Nicola to uncover the entire story of survival. The book accurately conveys the cave environment and the conditions found there. Cris and Peter are able to put this into language that non caver types can understand. The book had special meaning to me as I am one of few Americans to actually visit the site. To anyone this story is a moving example of a family fighting to survive under horrible conditions. The photo of the present day family on page 61 brought tears to my eyes. I highly reccomend giving this book a read.



2. Two authors, a cave expert and a photographer, tell this almost unbelievable story of how thirty-eight Jews from a village in the Ukraine survived the Holocaust. They clung tenaciously to life in two different caves for over one year, and somehow managed to come out of the experience physically, mentally, and emotionally intact. We feel admiration and empathy for these determined people who risked everything in order to stay together.
   The story of the caves is interwoven with the story of these people's survival. The authors conducted extensive interviews and consulted the memoir, We Fight to Survive, written in 1960 by Esther Stermer, the matriarch of one of the families. This book reads like an adventure story with a suspense-filled plot and fascinating characters. However, this is brutal fact, not artificial fiction. Generous margins, gorgeous photos of the people and places involved, accurate maps and fascinating sidebars make for a handsome book. The only elements lacking are an index and bibliography. One of the survivors, Shulim Stermer, states: "Everyone has it inside of them to survive." Peter Taylor wondered if he would be capable of the same will to fight for his own family's survival. The Secret of Priest's Grotto brings us face to face with this difficult question. Ages 10-14.



3. A book that should be read by all Holocaust-denyers. Had the privelage of meeting the authors and one of the family members written about.



4. This is a very nice book about a little-known story from WWII. It is just incredible what these Jewish families were able to endure to stay alive by hiding in caves, although none of them were experienced cavers. The story of the modern-day cave experts who rediscovered the story is also well done, and the two tales are woven beautifully to create the book. Modern cave photographs and historical images work combine to help tell the story.

5 comments about I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors.

1. The Holocaust occurred over six decades ago, and the survivors of this episode are aging and dying. In fact, calling the Holocaust an "episode" seems to be trivializing one of the darkest periods in human history. I apologize for any such characterization. The Holocaust was a monstrosity, an aberration, a blot on the record of humanity. Millions died.
   
   Yet some lived. And these survivors had a life, children, a home.
   
   This book, I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors, is author Bernice Eisenstein's recollections of growing up in a family that had both mother and father with tattooed arms. Even as a youngster, Eisenstein grappled with the knowledge of her parent's past, the stigma of being defined by this past, and the responsibility of maintaining memories without adding more pain to the world.
   
   I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors is not a first person account of experiences during WWII as you can read in Night, by Elie Wiesel, although some of her parent's stories are recounted. However, Eisenstein's experiences and memories are also real. She hungered to understand what her parents experienced. She cried harder than her parents when she watched films about the Holocaust. The Holocaust has shaped members of a succeeding generation.
   
   She exists because of the Holocaust, with her parents finding each other at liberation, and shaping her through their language, actions, and social life.
   
   The book has illustrations throughout... haunting depictions not of life in concentration camps, but how a child (and later a young woman) came to view her heritage.
   
   We all come from some place. Eisenstein comes from a place darker than we should ever have to see. I hope this book is picked as one to discuss in high schools and colleges.
   
   Never forget.



2. I too am a child of Holocaust survivors. I read this book (picked up by surprise in a bookstore) in one several hour reading. It is touching, moving, eloquent, great art, and deeply personal. Life and death, of all sorts. Happiness and sadness, of all sorts. I'm deeply appreciative for the author's letting the world in on her (my) life.
   David



3. this book is both illuminating and moving, I have already lent my copy to two other people. An important new voice on the Holocaust and it's survivors and descendants.



4. All I can say is that I hated the book. The author was so intent to find out all the sordid details of her parent's life during the Holocaust that she never got to know them for who they were. The book is boring and the drawings are silly and juvenile.



5. I received my order in a few days and it was in perfect condition. Very reliable seller.

1 comments about Our Father Abe: The Story of a Deaf Shoe Repairman.

1. I stumbled on "Our Father Abe: The Story of a Deaf Shoe Repairman" at the library looking for memoirs and passing the local history display.
   
   It's a gripping read! the authors, Abe's two children, have done an excellent job of storytelling, with a frank and graceful touch.
   
   This is a book poised at the intersection of personal history and cultural history. Abe (born 1900s to Russian Jews) lost his hearing before acquiring language, then went on to experience everything Jews in the 20th c. emigrating from Europe & landing in the midwest went through, but with the challenge of deafness in tow.
   
   This book would be of interest to the Deaf community as much as it is to the Jewish community or to memoir writers like me.
   
   A testament to the personal desire to publish, and the good that can radiate into the world from such a desire.

5 comments about A Red Boyhood: Growing Up Under Stalin.

1. One of the most touching and riveting war memoirs I have ever read.
   Anatole Konstantin's life is a triumph over incredible pain and suffering during the Stalin era. This is a must-read.



2. An incredible story of survival in the most horrific of times. This book is testimony to the human spirit - to a young man's determination to prevail. His commitment to books, to learning and his ability to recall and describe the details of his difficult life are admirable. Unfortunately - like so many books of this ilk - it lacks an index.



3. Kirkus Reviews
   
   A boy's-eye view of life during wartime-first the Soviet Union's vicious internal struggles under Stalin and then its horrific ordeal after the Germans invaded in 1941.
   
   Konstantin begins his memoir in dramatic fashion, recalling the night of April 17, 1938, when his father was taken away by the Soviet secret police and never seen again in their little town in the Ukraine. The early passages of the book do a fine job of explaining the climate in which such an incident could occur; Konstantin describes an Orwellian regime full of furtive police activities, mysterious disappearances and a terrorized populace.
   
   What makes Konstantin's recollections so captivating is his ability to effectively divide the text between small details vividly rendered, such as a trip to the movie theater, and the larger story of a global political and military struggle. Despite the upheavals that roiled his childhood, the author somehow managed to get a decent education; he refers frequently to inspirational teachers and to devouring books ranging from The Grapes of Wrath to Das Kapital. But these moments of enlightenment in Konstantin's young life were tempered by the unbearable wartime conditions; often, as he left school for the day, he saw corpses piled high on wagons to be carted away.
   
   His mother married a Polish refugee in 1944, and they were able to return with him to Poland in 1945, happy to escape the "cursed" Soviet Union. But the Soviets soon consolidated their grip on Poland, and the family fled west, finally winding up in a UN refugee camp in Germany. As a displaced person, Konstantin qualified for free tuition at a local university, and after three more years of struggle was finally able to emigrateto "the land of my dreams"-America. Uneven, but full of engaging details about a tumultuous period in world history.



4. A wonderful history told from the eyes of a boy, whose intelligence and curiosity contrast with the brutal, senseless politics of the Soviet world he lives in. Konstantin manages to write from the naïve perspective of his own youth, while adding the essential contemporary insights that give his journey a solid frame of historical context. The autobiography is written as a wandering tale of survival, that somehow manages to echo the universal stories of youth, the love of parents, the rejection of hypocrisy, the discovery of romance. Far from a polemic about the evils of a particular world view, it none the less exposes the absurdity of a Soviet state that venerates obsequious functionaries one week, and executes them the next. The author does not aim to play to our emotions, but we are moved. While the sophisticated comedy of underground jokes leaves us chuckling, the more lasting humor emerges from darkly comic moments we experience as fortunes change at the whim of Stalin or Hitler. We can easily imagine the irony of using expunged encyclopedia entries for rolling papers and bathroom tissue.
   Konstantin begins his story with the events that shattered a happy childhood, and led his family to wander the Soviet Empire. He ends the book with his arrival in the United States, where he will eventually become quite successful. In choosing not to write about the later years, he forces us to meditate on the plight of refugees everywhere. Success is simply escape, freedom, the opportunity to grow up in a reasonable place. By not updating us to the current world, he keeps the past alive, and we are left with the sense that life in a free land is indeed an open book.
   --Dr.Greg Hampikian, co-author of Exit to Freedom



5. Stalinist Russia - no one will ever say that was the pinnacle of Russian civilization, and in fact is well and below considered one of the nation's lowest points. "A Red Boyhood: Growing Up Under Stalin" is a memoir focusing on the life of one on the outskirts of society, one who lost countless loved ones to Stalin's purges, and under a mother who struggled just so that her and her boys could manage to survive. An even darker look into a dark era for the country's history, "A Red Boyhood: Growing Up Under Stalin" is highly recommended to community library memoir collections, especially those with a focus on world events.

1 comments about My Heart in a Suitcase (Library of Holocaust Testimonies).

1. Do you know how I can contact Anne L. Fox, author of "My Heart in a Suitcase (Library of Holocaust Testimonies)?" I understand that she is working on a new book on a topic that interests me.

5 comments about Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou.

1. Moses, Jennifer Anne. "Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou", The University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. $26.95.
   
   Seeking the Divine
   
   Amos Lassen
   
   My review copy of "Bagels and Grits" just arrived this afternoon as I was waiting for the delivery of furniture for my new place. I sat down with it and before I realized it I had read the entire book and I had the best time. Jennifer Moses is not new to the world of publishing. Articles she writes appear regularly in newspapers and magazines and she is a writer by profession. She is also a mother and volunteers at an AIDS hospice in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and also teaches Hebrew at her synagogue.
   If you did not know she was a writer, you could probably tell from her prose which abounds with grace and style combined with a noble wit. Her pages exude charm and you just want to find a way to get to her abode for a Shabbat dinner just so you can sit and chat with her.
   Moses writes about having moved from a liberal and affluent neighborhood of Washington, D.C. to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the land of gospel, crawfish and Christianity where everyone seems to be a friend of Jesus. After her move, she embarks on a journey of self-discovery and attempt at communion with G-d. In doing so, she finds the differences in culture in this country and she shares them with us.
   Moses was raised as an observant Jew in the northeastern United States and G-d is no more than something far away. Upon arriving in the South and the Bible belt, she went through a period of crisis regarding faith while serving as a volunteer at an AIDS hospice. As she writes, Moses takes her back to her past and then to the present and her conflicts that she experiences in the South. The portraits that she gives of her childhood and of her parents is vivid and the picture of the G-d of her mother is just like an oil painting, executed in beautiful detail. That G-d was one who, in her mother's words, was one "of good works and of giving to the Democratic party". Her father carried the mantle of Judaism and it is with her father that Moses seeks a relationship with G-d. Even though she was raised as an observant Jew, more or less, her skewed vision of G-d later drove her to seek a communion with her maker.
   It is her trip South that is the catalyst for her quest. The people she meets in Baton Rouge seem to be constantly in communion with G-d but in the author's opinion some of the encounters the people have with the deity are absurd and ridiculous, causing her to recoil in anger. They, of course, add bits of local color to their visions of the divine and this riles her up.
   Yet it is these people that take Moses into their world and they take the reader as well. Moses feels both anger and jealousy when she sees and hears about the southerners beliefs and she yearns to "be filled with a faith so buoyant" that it would sweep her past herself, past memory and sorrow and into an eternal embrace with G-d. She finds it increasingly difficult to understand why others have a relationship with G-d and she does not.
   Moses acts on this issue and begins to learn Hebrew as the first step. She slowly experiences divine touches as she struggles with skepticism but her faith increases and when she is diagnosed with breast cancer, she understands that her recovery will be a great deal easier because she has taken herself on a spiritual journey. Before she received the diagnosis, se began to see signs of G-d in ways that she can understand and her world begins to change.
   Surely by now you are wondering why she went to Baton Rouge in the first place. Her husband tired of his job as a lawyer and took a position as a professor of law at Louisiana State University. The family, herself and her husband and three children, moved there and it was then that her ideas about the Jewish religion began to deepen. It was the evangelical Christians who really made her realize that she needed to find strength in her G-d and this is what the book is all about.
   Moses tells a beautiful story of her own life as well as of the life of her family and brings the stories into a larger arena concerning the challenges that modern Judaism faces. Her desire to make sense of and live up to her historical heritage is an exquisite tale of self-discovery and renewal of faith.



2. This book is a collection of a northern woman's condescending opinions of social and religious life in a southern city. As a former resident of Washington, D.C., the author arrived in Baton Rouge with airs of intellectual and moral superiority. After many years, she has still not abandoned northern stereotypes of southerners or gained any insights into the southern way of life.



3. When the author's husband decides to leave his job as a lawyer to take one as a law professor, the family moves from their upscale, metropolitan home in the upper east to the deep south. Initially Jennifer Moses does so with a set of stereotypical beliefs about her new home area. She has a feeling of smug superiority over her new neighbors who, to her, all sound alike and don't know about the good things in life.
   
   Moses is Jewish, in a by-name-only way. She never became a bat mitzvah as a young girl.
   
   Her father, who never let his daughters date on Friday nights and always went to shul on Saturdays, never pressed his religion on his family. The author has lived life on the outer edges of Judaism. Moving to the Bible Belt makes her question her ideas about God and probe into her relationship with Him. In her new surroundings "you can't live in Baton Rouge without bumping up against Jesus just about every time you walk out of the house...."
   
   While living in a world full of strangers, the one woman she's known every day of her life deals with cancer. How does a good Jewish daughter deal with a terminally ill mother? Unable to help her mother with the distance between them, she volunteers at a residential treatment facility where she works with AIDS patients.
   
   With a sense of humor and a willing spirit, she works with people who may not have much longer to talk about the important things in life. Moses conveys the changes in her life along with the reasons for them in a way that makes you feel as if you already knew all this-you'd just never put it into words.
   
   Reading, you feel as if you're having a conversation with a new neighbor and learning what makes her tick. You'll surely invite her over to chat again as she's entertaining, engaging, and caring. And when you close the door on her book, you can't help but smile ... and ponder the subjects she discussed.
   
   Armchair Interviews says: A very touching story well told.



4. I know the author, whose twin children go to high school with my daughter, and have read many of her columns on religious issues in the local newspaper. The unfortunately-titled "Bagels and Grits", which sounds more like a book on comparative cooking and culture between the Northeast and south Louisiana, made me feel like I know Jennifer Moses a lot better, as I've now read the story of her religious journey from a secular Jewish teenager in Virginia to a woman who teaches Hebrew at her synagogue and writes columns on religious issues.
   
   Her journey and the book are inspired by of all things, volunteering a half-day a week in her new hometown of Baton Rouge, LA at an AIDS hospice. So many of the terminally-ill patients find comfort in their Christian faith that Ms. Moses begins to consider how a deeper spirituality might improve her own life. Her longstanding Jewish identity prevents her from going all the way to Christianity, but a new rabbi at a local synagogue helps her find her way to a deeper understanding of Judaism. She even becomes a bat-mitzvah, completing studies in Judaism and Hebrew that Jews generally do while teenagers.
   
   I found the story of Moses' rediscovery of Judaism in Baton Rouge (the "grits" part of the title) to be much more fascinating than flashbacks to her upper middle class upbringing in Virginia and young adult life in New York City (the "bagel" part). Still, Moses is a talented writer with a willingness to share quite personal information, making her book a quick read. One warning--if you're a big fan of Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson you might want to skip over Moses' two capsule reviews of that book. In her view, Mitch Albom's spiritual awakening doesn't quite measure up. I empathized more with Morrie's story than Mitch's, and didn't have such a negative reaction to the book, no matter its sentimentality.
   
   Four stars for a well-written, serious and informative account of one woman's spiritual journey that will probably be best enjoyed by those of us in the Baby Boomer generation.



5. I do not know what I thought I was getting when I picked this memoir up. Something humorous, perhaps. The title of another Moses' book is FOOD & WHINE. Something Jewish, of course. So many of my lovers were and friends are Jewish that I am perpetually attracted to that subject. And the bayou? That uniquely Southern/French combination. New Orleans is my favorite, but hey, Baton Rouge is close enough.
   
   That is what I expected, but what I got was the author, Jennifer, a terrified whiny young woman who wants it all (including God) for herself but does not know how to get it. Her beloved scattered family, people dying of AIDS in St. Anthony's where she volunteers, her rabbi, and her therapist all influence her. She writes, "God alone knows what the folks at St. Anthony's would think of me if they knew that not only do I cry buckets at the drop of a hat, but also that I actually pay money to someone to listen to me when I cry."
   
   Early reviewers aptly use words like witty, honest, probing to describe Bagels & Grits, which lives up to its reputation. The book opens with Jennifer driving a minivan, listening to HIV-positive patient, Lorraine, with skin "like polished mahogany" describe, again, how she shot her husband "right in the head" when she found him in bed with her auntie. "My favorite damn auntie." The book pads quietly on from there, word by word, day by day, slowly changing into a moving memoir of spiritual growth.
   
   Jennifer questions much of what she sees. Of the Christian God she encounters repeatedly in St. Anthony's she writes, "This is the God Who forgives you every last nasty thing you've ever done, and all you have to do [is] ask. So you've killed a few folks? No problem! Just call on Him at the very end and --presto!--you get into heaven. Whored around? Don't sweat it! Cheated on your income taxes? Come on down!"
   
   "At St. Anthony's, not only did He exist, but also, at times, He came down to earth to say howdy or give a thumbs-up. He was so present, so everyday, that you almost expected to bump into Him at the grocery store."
   
   I love this book. It brought me to tears, which books rarely do. Indeed, I loved the book so much I could not bear to put it down. So I didn't. I turned right back to page one and read it over again. Knowing what would happen, I focused on the wealth of detail Jennifer supplies, like this description of Geraldine, one of the AIDS patients: "she was pretty the way a bird is pretty, with small jutting bones under smooth skin and quick, darting movements."
   
   Read it if you can. Whether you are Christian, Jewish, or (like me) something else, this odd, detailed, delightful spiritual journey is bound to touch you.
   
   MARILYN COFFEY is an award-winning poet and a widely published author of prose. Visit http://www,Amazon.com to purchase her work: GREAT PLAINS PATCHWORK, MARCELLA, or KANSAS QUARTERLY Vol. 15 No. 2.

5 comments about What Becomes You (American Lives).

1. At first I was little reticent, fearing a lot of gay/anguished person trapped in the wrong body kind of stuff. Instead, I found the author's viewpoint startlingly original, and very much angst and dogma free. Aaron writes with a clear voice, and the little asides, and various characters he meets, and situations he ends up in...are seen from a wry and humorous point of view. Which is not to say there are not depths. Indeed, this book will definetly set you mind spinning as to just how we perceive ourselves, and how we let the world shape us. While the book is very good, I would love to see the author use this writing style to take on other projects. I think he has great potential. If you have any friends who are going thru big changes, this is a book I think they will like. I will definetly be buying it for some friends of mine. I rarely write reviews, but I think this is a very worthy book, and applaud the author's, honesty, and style.



2. I remember meeting Sarah many years ago.
   
   Aaron has given me insights that will hopefully allow me to be a better friend to several folks who share her experiences, I plan to recommend the book, not just to these friends, but to their friends and famlies.
   
   As a grandmother and great-grandmother, I share with Aaron the love of a wonderful person, his friend - my son. I thank him for the introduction, not only to Sarah, but now Aaron and the world he lives within. His book has furthered the limited education of this rural midwesterner, and I thank him so much for that.
   
   And remember, Aaron, when you dig in the sand, fingers and flippers often bear a striking resemblance! But that doesn't mean a crime has been committed. Keep exploring, and keep writing.



3. "What Becomes You" is fascinating, moving, educational and revealing. In this book Aaron and his mother examine their lives within the context of their experiences and expectations of gender, what it is and what it isn't, what it means and what it doesn't mean. This book avoids sentimentality and sensationalism---instead it is gentle, intelligent and intimate. Reading Aaron's section, I felt as if I were sitting beside him as he told me the story of his life, his emotions as a child growing up feeling always out of place in a female role, and his struggles as an adult who chose to change not simply his body but his relationship to the world. Reading his mother's section I experienced the roller-coaster of emotions that she felt during the years of Aaron's self-discovery and gender change and, along the way, undergoing her own trials with breast cancer. Throughout the book the authors' love and respect for one another's lives is palpable. This book is not just a "trans" story. It is the story of family, longing, love, loss, society, work, literature, healing and much more.



4. Raised a woman, Aaron Raz Link became a man - a gay man - at the age of 29. At least, he initiated the hormonal and surgical processes to alter his appearance toward a form closer to the person he had always felt he was inside. Because Link was trained as a scientist - specifically, taxonomy, the science of naming things - he is uniquely fit to analyze his unusual experience. It doesn't hurt that he's a beautiful writer as well as a thoughtful and witty one.
   
   The book is nonfiction, he explains, and a memoir, but not autobiography: "It is a book about pieces that didn't fit the picture. As a result, the most confusing and difficult pieces play the largest roles." Strictly speaking, he writes, there is no such thing as a "sex change operation"; there are rather lots of little surgeries that were developed for other reasons, such as for badly mutilated soldiers, and infants and grownups whose bodies took an odd turn due to misbehaving hormones or cancer.
   
   Link's analysis of his youthful fascination with movie monsters (they "were obviously the good guys"), of the Catch-22 of having to get himself diagnosed as mentally ill in order to qualify for the surgeries (legally speaking, "a mentally healthy person wouldn't want what I wanted"), and the absurdities of psychiatry and people's assumptions about gender roles, are all fascinating and well handled. There's even a kind of punch line: After an early lifetime of hating to be laughed at, following his sex reassignment, Link went to clown school.
   
   Though a professor of English and women's studies who has been writing and publishing much longer than her son, Hilda Raz's less-than-a-third of the book is diffuse and less compelling - which probably reflects her passive and somewhat unwilling role in her son's transformation.
   
   What Becomes You makes a terrific companion to Self-Made Man, lesbian journalist Norah Vincent's 2006 account of her three months dressing and living as a man. They're great food for any reader's thought.



5. This book tells the much needed minority story of what it means to be transgendered. The author did not necessarily experience his difference as one of gender in early childhood. Instead, he just felt different than the other children. He came to see gender as part of his problem as he got older. Even then, he doesn't identify with the feeling of being a "man trapped in a woman's body". Literature usually tells the stories of transgendered people who have always known they are the wrong gender, and who easily fit stereotyped notions of what transgendered people are. It is nice to see someone who doesn't fit the mold and to hear a story told from a different perspective.
   
   While this does add some diversity to the literature on transgendered people, it is not a good introductory book. The author takes an unusual and highly dangerous approach to obtaining medical care, so this book is not a good way to learn about the process of transitioning. Also, there is very little factual information in this book about what is involved in a transition. Since that is not it's primary purpose, though, it still makes a great narrative.

5 comments about A Bag of Marbles.

1. this book made me want to read more. It kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time. You are really rooting for the boys to come out of this entire oredeal alright.+



2. This is a beautiful book that tells the true story of two young Jewish boys on the run from the Gestapo in war-torn France. The author, Joseph Joffo is never nostalgic about the ordeal he and his brother went through in their bid to escape the Death Camps of Nazi Germany. He writes from the heart but he writes with purpose. His story is a warning to future generations never to take their lives for granted. A Bag of Marbles is a fantastic book that should be on the shelves of every school in the world, just to remind future generations that life is not always a bed of roses...



3. Kudos to the translator for keeping the author's words & spirit in tact in this heroic and moving testimonial about what it took to survive the Holocaust & what we all must do to keep other holocausts from happening again. In his own words, "be brave, know how to take care of yourself, don't rely on others, don't let your emotions get the better of you, take responsibility." Clearly, this title is a story that will encourage & remind young readers to always remember and to take responsibility.



4. The story is about two young boys : Joe and Maurice, they are French and Jews, it's in Paris during world War 2. So they must avoid. they went to the south, near the Italian border.
   The story is touching and well writing, but sometimes it's very boring, because there isn't a lot of action.



5. A bag of marbles was pretty good. If you are looking for an educational book about wwII and want to escape the gore, this is the book for you. It gets a little slow, but you really do find yourself caring for theses two boys. Plus, it is non-fiction.