General & Miscellaneous Jewish Biography, Jewish Fiction & Literature

Jew Boy

Name: Jew Boy
Author: Alan Kaufman
ISBN: 9780880642521

by Alan Kaufman

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Overview

Jew Boy tells the story of a child in the Bronx growing up in the complex shadow of his mother's survival of the Holocaust in Europe. Physically abused by a woman whose horrifying experiences have left her emotionally scarred, Alan Kaufman is forced to deal with the demons haunting his mother as he struggles uncomprehendingly with his Jewish identity. He escapes from his crazy home life to the school yard, only to find one kind of savagery exchanged for another. He experiences the first pangs of adolescent sexuality, undergoes the ritual of an American bar mitzvah, and re-creates himself as a mindless football fanatic on his high-school team, joining in its sadistic rituals and drills. In one of the high points of his narrative, he hitchhikes across the United States and, on the way back, hops an eastbound freight train that brings him face-to-face with the very phantoms he had sought to escape. Kaufman's odyssey finally takes him from an Israeli kibbutz and the Israeli army to his descent into alcoholism on the streets of New York, until at last, finding in poetry the gift that is true to his being, he also finds sobriety in San Francisco.

Kaufman's coming-of-age account is by turns hilarious and terrifying, written with irreverent humor and poetic introspection. Best of all, its authentically American voice, with its headlong energy, joy, and sensitivity, call to mind the best of Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller. Jew Boy touches on themes rarely explored in American writing-the pain, guilt, and confusion of American-born children of Holocaust survivors, and what it means to be a Jew in post-Holocaust America. But above all it burns with the universal humanity of a brilliantwriter embracing the gift of life with a fierce passion that will leave no reader untouched.

Alan Kaufman, author of The New Generation: Fiction for Our Time from America's Writing Programs and Who Are We?, is the editor of the anthology The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. His writings have appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, Tikkun, Tel Aviv
* , Witness, and other publications, as well as in many Web 'zines, including Tattoo Jew, of which he is the editor. A former editor of Jewish Frontier, he is the founder and editor of the controversial magazine Davka: Jewish Cultural Revolution and has performed as a spoken-word poet in the United States and abroad.

* "Kaufman's bravado memoir is a glorious fusionary work mixing and matching Henry Miller's direct and outrageous wit with Kerouac's sharp observational eye and vernacular rhythms." —David Meltzer
* "Powerfully moving and a delight to read." —Jack Kornfield

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Editorials

Sapphire

With his passionate and powerful memoir, Jew Boy, Alan Kaufman moves from the periphery of American literature to its shining center. Jew Boy is a searing testimony destined to stand the test of time. Kaufman has written a book for all people for all time.
(—Sapphire, author of Black Wings & Blind Angels: Poems and Push: A Novel)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"I experienced my first wet dream on a Sunday night after reading a Dick Tracy comic strip on the front page of the Sunday edition of the New York Daily News," writes poet Kaufman (Who Are We?)in this visceral memoir of how his Jewish identity has influenced his sexuality, writing and imagination. Indeed, for much of his journey to adulthood, self-acceptance and becoming an artist, the concepts of sex, writing and the imagination have been inseparable for Kaufman. Growing up in the Bronx with a deeply depressed mother who was a Holocaust survivor, Kaufman came to grips with his Jewish heritage in disquieting ways: he found himself sexually turned on by photos of German death camps, formed a clique in high school that jokingly called for "death to the Jews" and created "The Purple Jew," a comic book that featured a Jewish superhero even as Kaufman understood that "more than anything in the world, I wanted not to be Jewish." He is able to combine humor and pathos with a cold-blooded sense of irony in his chilling descriptions of uncovering his identity--whether it is through going to a brothel to have sex for the first time ("I still felt like a virgin, only contaminated by paid-for sex") or remembering, as he terrorizes Palestinian children during a stint in the Israeli army, how his mother was captured by German soldiers ("I know it's not the same"). Frightening and deeply moving, Kaufman's memoir is a remarkable document. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

Kaufman's life has been anything but uneventful, and his memories are vivid and detailed. Combine these with his mastery of the writer's craft, and the result is an intriguing and captivating story. That story, told here, begins in the Bronx, where the author lived with his parents and brother. His mother was a Holocaust survivor, a fact that profoundly influenced the family and was a major element in the Jewish identity that Kaufman struggled to accept. Both asthmatic and athletic, a football player and an aspiring writer, Kaufman hitchhiked to California as a teenager and was arrested in Nebraska for hopping a freight train on the way back. Eventually, he made his way to an Israeli kibbutz and into the Israeli army. Back in the States and after a bout with homelessness and alcoholism, Kaufman became that writer he aspired to be, writing poetry (Who Are We?) and editing the Jewish Frontier, DAVKA, and the web zine www.tattoojew.com. Kaufman is a great teller of his own, moving story.--John Moryl, Yeshiva Univ. Lib., New York Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.