Gentile reader, and you, Jews, come too. Follow Sue William Silverman, a one-woman cultural mash-up, on her exploration of identity among the mishmash of American idols and ideals that confuse most of us—or should. Pat Boone is our first stop. Now a Tea Party darling, Boone once shone as a squeaky-clean pop music icon of normality, an antidote for Silverman’s own confusing and dangerous home, where being a Jew in a Christian school wasn’t easy, and being the daughter of the Anti-Boone was unspeakable. And yet somehow Silverman found her way, a “gefilte fish swimming upstream,” and found her voice, which in this searching, bracing, hilarious, and moving book tries to make sense of that most troubling American condition: belonging, but to what?
Picking apricots on a kibbutz, tramping cross-country in a loathed Volkswagen camper, appearing in a made-for-television version of her own life: Silverman is a bobby-soxer, a baby boomer, a hippy, a lefty, and a rebel with something to say to those of us—most of us—still wondering what to make of ourselves.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Acknowledgments Dear Gent[i]le Reader The Pat Boone Fan Club The Wandering Jew The Mercurialist Gentle Reader The Endless Possibilities of Youth Swimming Like a Gefilte Fish For Jews Only That Summer of War and Apricots The Invisible Synagogue Concerning Cardboard Ghosts, Rosaries, and the Thingness of Things Prepositioning John Travolta Gentle Reader Galveston Island Breakdown: Some Directions Gentle Reader The Fireproof Librarian Fahrvergnügen: A Road Trip through a Marriage Almond Butter in the Ruints I Was a Prisoner on the Satellite of Love (Featuring Crow T. Robot, Star, Mystery Science Theater 3000) 000See the Difference The New Pat Boone Show My Sorted Past Gentle Reader An Argument for the Existence of Free Will and/or Pat Boone’s Induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Encore
