Overview

Even as a fourth-generation Jewish Texan, S. L. Wisenberg has always felt the ghost of Europe dogging her steps, making her feel uneasy in her body and in the world. At age six, she’s sure that she hears Nazis at her bedroom window and knows that after they take her away, she’ll die without her asthma meds. In her late twenties, she infiltrates sorority rush at her alma mater, curious about whether she’ll get a bid now. Later in life, she makes her first and only trip to the mikvah while healing from a breast biopsy (benign this time), prompting an exploration of misogyny, shame, and woman-fear in rabbinical tradition. With wit, verve, blood, scars, and a solid dose of self-deprecation, Wisenberg wanders across the expanse of continents and combs through history books and family records in her search for home and meaning. Her travels take her from Selma, Alabama, where her Eastern European Jewish ancestors once settled, to Vienna, where she tours Freud’s home and figures out what women really want, and she visits Auschwitz, which—disappointingly—leaves no emotional mark.

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9781625347350

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Reviews

Each essay is a lens through which we are invited to view in Joycean detail the author's deeply personal present, yet at the same time to ponder and to rethink larger worlds of history and cultures. It's a collection that often is wry but never cynical, acutely learned and always alert to humor and wonder. --David Toomey, author of Weird Life: The Search for Life That Is Very, Very Different from Our Own A sharp, deeply questioning mind and a wayward heart inform these delicious essays. They are wry, humorous, melancholy, and universally relatable, filled with the shock of recognition. --Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait Inside My Head: Essays

Author Information

S. L. Wisenberg is editor of Another Chicago Magazine and author of the fiction collection, The Sweetheart Is In, and two nonfiction books, Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, and Other Obsessions and The Adventures of Cancer Bitch. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Holocaust Education Foundation, and the Illinois Arts Council, Wisenberg works as a writing coach, editor, and creative writing instructor in Chicago.

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