i just finished reading the book too jewish by patty freidmann on my kindle. i was blown away to say the least. the book is about a holocaust survivor who ends up living in new orleans and marrying a jewish woman from a very assimilated jewish family . to his wife's family he is too jewish. what i found startling was how assimilated these people are. i saw the play the last night of ballyhoo by alfred uhry which is also about the jewish southern experience and how assimilated they were as opposed to new york jews , but they did not prepare me for this book. the post ww2 southern jews portrayed here are so out of touch with judaism that it is hard to understand. i grew up in the midwest decades later and can't imagine jews , not even secular jews , being that out of touch. had i not seen the play the last night of ballyhoo i would not have believed it.
this story is fiction , but its based on patty friedman's life. her dad was a holocaust survivor. her mom was a southern jew. her grandparents thought her father 'too jewish' . i do not want to give away the whole story , but it is worth reading. it is eye opening in a disturbing way. i say read this book because there are jews so assimalated that they are out of touch with the jewish experience. in new york there at least is a jewish culture. other places not so much. this book is a best seller on the kindle. read it and find out why.
6 comments:
I haven't read the book so I don't know how assimilated the characters are. But generally I would be careful about overgeneralizing from a novel.
In places like Atlanta there are tens of thousands (in Atlanta, 100,000) Jews. There are even Orthodox Jews and eruvim and the occasional kosher restaurant.
And the Jews that aren't frum are really not that different than Conservative and Reform Jews in New York (though it is true that at the margins there are more who are lost to Judaism in various ways). They don't necessarily have Christmas trees or name their sons Christopher, Christina and Mary.
the book was speaking about a certain time period. this is post world war two. and the book is speaking about a specific group of people who were VERY assimilated and they were a lot more assimilated than those in new york. not all jews were like this, but many were and this is what the book speaks of. and yes had they lived in new york or a lot of other places it would have been different. this book does not take place in atlanta. it takes place in new orleans.
i grew up outside of new york in the midwest and it was not chicago. it is different than new york .unequivically. there are plenty of frum jews out of town , but it is different. it can be better, but its also easier to assimilate elsewhere because there is less of a peer pressure as there is in new york. i miss living out of town, but it is different .
woodrow/ conservadox - you should read the book though so you see what i mean.
Just wanted to let you know, the publishers who ran Too Jewish just came out with a new ebook called Felice's Worlds: From the Holocaust to the Halls of Modern Art, a memoir about the author's mother, who escaped the Holocaust, became a political activist in Lithuania and Palestine, and ended up collecting modern art in the states. Just finished it. It's beautiful, I think you'd really love it: http://www.amazon.com/Felices-Worlds-Holocaust-Modern-ebook/dp/B0079Q0HU6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1329434260&sr=1-1
thanks for the reccomendation stephanie
Post a Comment