Aside from two fully employed adults, our home houses several
thousand books. Because we don’t
practice the “one in, one out” philosophy in acquiring them, the books overfill
the shelves and are stacked on flat surfaces around our home. The books with
the best address, upright on one of the sets of shelves handmade by my father,
or my uncle, have been with me the longest. Some of the oldest have been
through eight moves or more, from my adolescent home to the house where I live
with my husband today.
I bought the mass market paperback copy of Harlan Ellison’s Strange
Wine on a trip to Washington, D.C. the summer between my junior and senior
year of high school. The Making of a
Woman Surgeon dates at least back to my middle school years. I have three anthologies of Shakespeare: a
red one from my undergraduate classes, a Riverside edition from my grad school
days, and a charming, if comparatively petite, volume a student gave me in the
last couple of years. I reread books and
feel compelled to keep so many because I don’t know if it will be possible to
find some of them when the mood to read them again strikes. Even the advent of
e-books hasn’t made it possible to have every book available at any time; it is
only recently, for instance, that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books
have become digitized. Beyond Auntie
Mame and The Joyous Season, none of Patrick Dennis’ books are
available in e-book editions. So I keep them. And many, many others.
Yet, I often can’t resist picking up another book I haven’t read
from the 25 cent table at my favorite book store or a pile at a library sale.
Thus this series, “Off My Shelf,” where I take a book from a
shelf or a pile, read (or reread it) and decide whether it stays or goes.
First up, Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou by
Jennifer Anne Moses.
I think I’m going to have to read the inner flaps more
carefully, because this book trapped me.
When I found it at a library book sale, I thought I was picking up a lighthearted
book about the clash of cultures when an Eastern Jew moves to Baton Rouge, but instead
the book turns out to be a spiritual memoir about another kind of journey: the
one where a woman finds her best spiritual practice by practicing spirituality.
There are brief interludes in the book when Moses squints at the
culture she finds in Baton Rouge, especially how talk of Jesus permeates it. Moses
writes, “…you can’t live in Baton Rouge without bumping up against Jesus about
every time you walk out of the house, not only on the doorstep in the form of
local missionaries, but also on your neighbors’ lips, on the towering JESUS IS
THE ANSWER, on the airwaves…” Of course, Moses also notes that at the time her
family moved to Baton Rouge, there were only about 1,000 Jews in a city of
280,000. So the Jesus thing was going to
be unavoidable.
The true topic
of the book, however, is Moses’ effort to practice the mitzvah of bikkur cholim: visiting the sick. At the beginning of the book, she tells how
she decided to visit the residents at St. Anthony’s, a hospice for people with
AIDS, and spent her time running errands for and with the residents, talking to
them, reading to them (sometimes the New Testament, a pastime she describes
modestly as ‘uncomfortable’), and falling in love with the souls she
encountered.
Moses seems
open to religious experience in a variety of ways, from the emotional response
she feels to the gospel music at the funerals she attends in Baton Rouge, to
the studies she undertakes in preparation for a mid-life bat mitzvah.
While there
are touches of humor throughout, the book is serious about documenting Moses’
disaffected relationship with her father and how that led her to study Judaism
more deeply, her relationship with her dying mother, and the almost mystical
connections and rifts she experienced in her religious quest.
While I am
glad I read the book, I don’t think I need to keep it. The notable passages I copied into my
commonplace book, the rest of the book I can let go. Moses has written other books, including two
children’s books, and information about them can be found
at www.jenniferannemosesarts.com. The website also features some of her
paintings, which have a clear Chagall influence and complement the stories she
tells in Bagels and Grits.
