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The Scientists: A Family Romance
Marco Roth
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012. 208 pp. $23.00

With the precociousness expected of the only child of a doctor and a classical musician--from the time he could get his toddler tongue to a pronounce a word like "De-oxy ribonucleic acid," or recite a French poem--Marco Roth was able to share his parents' New York, a world centered around house concerts, a private library of literary classics, and dinner discussions of the latest advances in medicine. That world ended when his father started to suffer the worst effects of the AIDS virus that had infected him in the early 1980s. What this family could not talk about for years came to dominate the lives of its surviving members, often in unexpected ways. The Scientists is a story of how we first learn from our parents and how we then learn to see them as separate individuals; it's a story of how precociousness can slow us down when it comes to knowing about our desires and other people's.

Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora

Emily Raboteau

Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013. 320 pp. $25.00
 

Emily Raboteau's Searching for Zion takes readers around the world on an unexpected adventure of faith. Both one woman's quest for a place to call "home" and an investigation into a people's search for the Promised Land. At the age of twenty-three, Emily Raboteau traveled to Israel to visit her childhood best friend. While her friend appeared to have found a place to belong, Raboteau could not yet say the same for herself. As a biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines, she'd never felt at home in America. But as a reggae fan and the daughter of a historian of African-American religion, Raboteau knew of "Zion" as a place black people yearned to be. She'd heard about it on Bob Marley's Exodus and in the speeches of Martin Luther King. She understood it as a metaphor for freedom, a spiritual realm rather than a geographical one. Now in Israel, the Jewish Zion, she was surprised to discover black Jews. More surprising was the story of how they got there. Inspired by their exodus, Raboteau sought out other black communities that left home in search of a Promised Land. Her question for them is same she asks herself: have you found the home you're looking for?

 From The ProsenPeople

People would often underestimate me if they knew that my parents hadn't taken good care of me, so I used to be covert about the six years my family was chronically homeless and the years I spent in placement with the Jewish Child Care Association.

 

In Oral Pleasure: Kosinski as Storyteller, published last month by Grove/Atlantic, Jerzy Kosinski's late widow, Kikki, collects interviews, lectures, and transcriptions of media appearances of the legendary literary figure.
  

This week's reviews...

  

Arbitrary Judaism

We grew up with my mother's special brand of religion: Eccentric Judaism.

 

January is one of my favorite months at the Jewish Book Council.
 
My parents left the United States in 1973 to retire in Bat Yam, Israel, the country in which they met and married in 1934, and where my brother Norman was born.
Check back all week for guest blog posts from Cliff Graubart for the Jewish Book Council and MyJewishLearning's Visiting Scribe series! 
 
To read these posts and more, please visit The ProsenPeople.
 
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