Roots Schmoots

From a Booker Prize-winning author, an "informed and witty" travelogue exploring America, Israel, Lithuania, and the nature of Jewish identity (Publishers Weekly).

 


Howard Jacobson had been hoping to make a journey to Lithuania to search for his Jewish roots. So when the BBC offered to send him around the globe to report on a variety of Jewish communities, he accepted. The trip he recounts in this memoir takes him to New York City, where tension simmers between Jews and African Americans; to California, where he visits a gay synagogue; to Israel, where he encounters the spectrum of Jewishness from Orthodox right-wing hardliners to tolerant, peace-loving kibbutzniks. And ultimately, to Lithuania, the land of his forefathers, where he discovers that antisemitism still lurks.


 


"A lively, irreverent but ultimately serious account of a British Jew's search for his roots." —Elizabeth Benedict, The New York Times

 


"Profound and moving." —Publishers Weekly