A Jewish Appendix: a memoir - Softcover

Sobsey, Adam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1963908228 ISBN 13: 9781963908220

Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2025

Synopsis

“I share much with my parents—appearance, ideology, interests, an area code—but a significant difference between us is that they were raised Jewish and I wasn’t.”

Adam Sobsey went to Romania out of idle curiosity to visit the homeland of his great-grandparents. A nonpracticing Jew, his encounter with Romania’s livid legacy of Jewish persecution and destruction afflicted him with sudden physical and emotional distress. Overwhelmed in body and spirit, he was forced to confront—and finally to embrace—his Jewish identity and heritage. A Jewish Appendix, an intensely personal memoir by turns spare and lyrical, wry and confessional, ambivalent yet passionate, and enriched by erudition lightly worn, captures the drama, paradox, and power of Jewish identity. It is a book for Jews and non-Jews alike who are on a search for the meaning of their roots.

***
“Unique, thrilling, and epically weird, in the very best sense.”
(Mark Oppenheimer, author of Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood)

“The most variable and memorable use of the metaphor of the appendix since Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices.”
(Sam Stephenson, author of Gene Smith’s Sink: A Wide-Angle View)

About this title

About the Author

Adam Sobsey is the author of Chrissie Hynde: A Musical Biography (University of Texas Press, 2017), and co-author of Bull City Summer: A Season at the Ballpark (Daylight Books, 2014). He has written for The Paris Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Missouri Review, Cincinnati Review, Spin, Journal of Experimental Ontology, Disruptive Quarterly, and many others. He is a staff writer at PopMatters, Spectrum Culture, and formerly at Baseball Prospectus. He is the recipient of a Michener Fellowship, a North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship, and numerous awards as a journalist and playwright. His plays have been staged in New York, California, Texas, and North Carolina.

Edition details

• Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil Publishing
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1963908228
• ISBN 13: 9781963908220
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368