Memoir / Judaica / Social Issues
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Bagels
and Grits "Bagels and Grits is one of the most moving spiritual memoirs I've ever read. From beginning to end it held me enthralled."–James Wilcox, director of creative writing, Louisiana State University and author of Heavenly Days and Hunk City more Jennifer Anne Moses left behind a comfortable
life in the upper echelons of East Coast Jewish society to move
with her husband and children to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Searching
for connection to her surroundings, she decided to volunteer
at an AIDS hospice. But as she encountered a culture populated
by French Catholics and Evangelical Christians, African Americans
and Cajuns, altruistic nurses and nuns, ex-cons, street-walkers,
impoverished AIDS patients, and healers of all stripes, she found
she had embarked on an unexpected journey of profound self-discovery.
"A powerful, witty, honest, and probing spiritual autobiography of the first order. . . . Moses grows and grows in this book as she opens more and more to the love and faith and pain around her." –Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus and The History of Last Night's Dream "An enchanting, enthralling, and enlightening
memoir–part Nora Ephron, part Harold Kushner, and–happily–uniquely
Jennifer Anne Moses! An exciting, tender, and most affecting
voyage of discovery." –Jay Neugeboren, author of Imagining
Robert, The Stolen Jew, and News from the New American
Diaspora Fans of Moses's earlier book, Food and Whine, a collection of witty musings on her life as a 30-something wife, mother, and ur-yuppie in Washington, D.C., will be stunned (albeit pleasantly so) by the quantum leap her prose has taken in this new volume. At some point between her writing those early essays and this book, Moses's husband got sick of being a lawyer and took a job as a law professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. So the couple and their three school-age kids move to the Bayou and there, in the Bible Belt of the Deep South, the fish-out-of-water Moses gradually experiences a rebirth and deepening of her Jewish faith. Her search is galvanized, at least in part, by the volunteer work she does at the city's St. Anthony's AIDS hospice, amid patients and workers whose evangelical Christianity is as unshakeable as their circumstances are dire. Beautifully weaving both her personal crises and her family history into a larger discussion of the challenges facing contemporary Judaism, Moses, whose writing here is as witty as ever but much more thoughtful and nuanced than in the past, creates a moving portrait of a thoroughly modern woman struggling to make sense of, and to live up to, the faith of her forebears. –Lorraine Glennon, Ladies Home Journal "Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the
Bayou In an absorbing memoir, Moses (Food
and Whine) describes her disorienting move from Washington,
D.C., to Baton Rouge, a city home to a paltry 220 or so Jewish
families. Moses, who had a strong Jewish identity but little
connection to religious practice, found herself grappling with
her new city's intense Christianity: just about everyone was
on intimate terms with Jesus. Moses's move to Baton Rouge, coupled
with her mother's deteriorating health, prompted her to study
Hebrew and celebrate her bat mitzvah, which she had not done
as a girl. Yet this book is not just a spiritual autobiography.
It is also an account of a daughter struggling toward the end
of her mother's life–chemotherapy and cancer haunt every
page. Moses's prose is lyrical and fresh: her daughter, for instance,
is "so content within her skin that it's as if she'd been
born with the soul of a shaman," and Moses's childhood,
in which tennis games, ski trips and her parents' cocktail parties
all somehow culminated in Shabbat dinner, was "like living
in a John Cheever novel edited by Isaac Bashevis Singer."
Moses has a vivid sense of humor and never takes herself too
seriously. After finishing this book, readers may wish they could
sit down over a bagel and grits and visit with her. (Oct.)–Publishers
Weekly
Jennifer Moses has a web site, with more information about this book, visit: www.jenniferannemoses.com There is a press kit for this book, see Bagels and Grits. For more information contact our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu |
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Jennifer
Anne Moses is a writer living in
Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her essays, reporting, reviews, and travel
and opinion pieces have appeared frequently in the New York
Times, Washington Post, Baton Rouge Advocate, Notre Dame Magazine,
Atlanta Journal Constitution, Salon, Mademoiselle, Commentary,
and many other popular publications. She is the author of
the book Food and Whine: Confessions of a New Millennium Mom.
In addition to her work as a writer and mother, she volunteers
at St. Anthony's Home, a residence for AIDS patients in Baton
Rouge, and teaches Hebrew at Beth Shalom Synagogue.
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