A Jewish Appendix - by Adam Sobsey (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Known for his smart, lively baseball writing, his acclaimed biography of the rock music legend Chrissie Hynde, and his erudite literary essays, Adam Sobsey returns with a powerful, passionate, deeply personal memoir of reckoning with his Jewish identity.

In October of 2018, the day after a gunman walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed eleven Jews, Adam Sobsey woke up with acute stomach pain. The next morning, he was in surgery to remove his appendix. A nonpracticing Jew, he made no connection between these two events. But six months later, when he arrives in Romania to visit the homeland of his great-grandparents, who had immigrated a century earlier - to Pittsburgh, where they helped found a synagogue-he is besieged by a mysterious illness that responds to no treatment and just as mysteriously vanishes the day he leaves the country, three weeks later.

Through the upheaval in his body and his encounters with the ravaged ruins of Jewish life in Romania-and flooded by memories of his own past-Sobsey is forced to confront his Jewish identity and roots. Once at home again, he bonds to his heritage by immersing himself in the power of words: a forgotten corner of the Hebrew Bible, the legendary travel writing of Patrick Leigh Fermor, and Jewish writers and artists ranging from the seminal Romanian existentialist poet Benjamin Fondane, who perished at Auschwitz, to Bob Dylan himself. Finally, he goes to Pittsburgh, in search of last clues about his family origins.

Review Quotes

"Unique, thrilling, and epically weird, in the very best sense."

(Mark Oppenheimer, author of Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood)

"The most variable and memorable use of the metaphor of the appendix since Brian Eno's A Year with Swollen Appendices."

(Sam Stephenson, author of Gene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View)

With conflict raging in Israel and antisemitism on the rise in America, A Jewish Appendix is both a timely account and an enduring testimony. In deft, capable prose, by turns spare and lyrical, comical and tragic, scholarly and searching, Adam Sobsey's memoir of travel, illness, and belonging gives resonant voice to the paradox and power of Jewish identity, capturing a drama of body and soul, epigenetic trauma, and finally, transformation.

"There are many books chronicling an author's quest for his heritage, but how many of them begin with a bout of appendicitis, wend through Azerbaijan, Albania, and Romania, and land in Pittsburgh, with interludes of Kafka, the composer Mendelssohn, and the curious exercise known as Pilates? Adam Sobsey's A Jewish Appendix is unique, thrilling, and epically weird, in the very best sense."

Mark Oppenheimer, author of Squirrel Hill

"In this unusual, understated, and brilliant memoir and travelogue, Adam Sobsey writes that he shares much with his parents, including the same area code, but "a significant difference between us is that they were raised Jewish and I wasn't." In trying to reconcile this lifelong difference, he journeys into geographic roots of his family tree overseas and the inner evidence of his own past. He searches for-and is searched out by-compelling and sometimes oblique traces and hints: the heaviest doors he'd ever tried to open at a museum in Albania; the oldest Jewish theater company on earth in Romania; the agonies he went through while writing a play about the antisemitic Ezra Pound. Always musing deeply, with a subliminal pulse of comedy, Sobsey makes the most variable and memorable use of the metaphor of the appendix since Brian Eno's memoir, A Year with Swollen Appendices."

Sam Stephenson, author of Gene Smith's Sink: A Wide-Angle View

"This is a book about travel. Travel matters as transformation. So Adam Sobsey cites in the beginning, 1 Samuel 10:16: 'And you shall turn into another man, ' and writes of himself at the end. 'I shall go on becoming another man.' 'As People of the Book in permanent revolt against resignation' is how he registers the non-identical nature of Jewish presence. One of many interesting flirtations with travel and book in this work is the one Sobsey has with the philosopher Benjamin Fondane's essay 'Existential Monday and the Sunday of History': as an element of his exploration of Romania, as a work of philosophy about freedom and inevitability, and as part of his investigation of Jewish becoming in the world. Adam Sobsey remains true throughout to his journey and to his name, as man (Adam) and earthling (Adamah)."

Leonard Schwartz, editor and co-translator of Benjamin Fondane's Cine-Poems and Other (New York Review Books Classics)