reviews

Publisher's Weekly: 

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 home'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 had 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 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.)

From LADIES HOME JOURNAL (on-line)

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

 

 

Shalom Y'all

from the New Orleans Times Picayune

By Susan Larson

The best spiritual memoirs give readers that sense of the great leap -- into faith, into action, into the new life. In "Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou," Jennifer Moses recalls just such a moment during her first day of volunteering at St. Anthony's AIDS hospice:

"But I really was scared," she writes. "Scared that at any moment one of the residents would sniff out my mealy-mouthed, do-gooding pretensions, see right through my perky exterior to my barbed and cramped heart, and expose me. Scared of my incompetence, my lack of center. What was I doing there? I was a struggling writer, a nice Jewish girl with a history of depression from a wealthy East Coast family, the wife of a university professor, a person who obsessed about the contents of the New York Times Book Review and spent her summers on a crystal-clear lake in Maine. That first day at St. Anthony's I felt like I was standing on the edge of the abyss, a hair's breadth away from chaos."

She makes the leap. She allows herself to care, she puts herself in the service of St. Anthony's residents, letting their spiritual struggles in the face of the great unknown inform her own. She drives them around town, reads to them, sounding "like a cross between Jerry Seinfeld and Ruth Bader Ginsburg," listens to their stories, takes them to heart.

And why? Her own mother is struggling with ovarian cancer; helpless to help her own mother, Moses turns to those she can help, inspired by the message of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America." And in doing so, Moses sets about transforming her own life.

Moses moved to Baton Rouge when her husband changed his life, becoming a law professor rather than a lawyer in practice. The move South tossed her into the rich cultural milieu of south Louisiana, and, as she puts it, "you can't live in Baton Rouge without bumping up against Jesus just about every time you walk out of the house." She finds a synagogue, a rabbi, becomes the first woman in her family to become a bat mitzvah. She publishes her first book, "Food and Wine: Confessions of a New Millennium Mom," and struggles with her writing, even at times, threatening to write a memoir called "How's Bayou?" But above all, she cultivates her spiritual life, which will stand her in good stead when, down the road, she faces her own battle with breast cancer.

Her inquiring heart is open to many sources: "Years later, when we were again living in Baton Rouge after a yearlong sabbatical in Glasgow, Scotland, I started seeing a nun, Sister Dulce Maria, for spiritual counseling, which might seem odd for a Jew, but there you have it. And anyway, Sister Dulce isn't your ordinary nun, but a healing nun, who, like Rabbi Stan, believes that God is bigger than religion, and told me that even when I died, and went to heaven, I'd be Jewish. She also told me that, when she was a child of no more than five, she had almost drowned in the Gulf of Mexico, but just before she was about to lose consciousness, she heard a voice. The voice, she said, told her to bob to the surface and then to walk. 'Breathe, walk, breathe, step forward,' the voice said, and in that way, she was led up and out of the water. Had Sister Dulce told me this story before my own experience with the fragility of my own life, the utter vulnerability of my continuing existence, I'm not sure I would have believed her -- or at the very least, I would have chalked her story up to some other, paranormal, extra-psychological force. But not a voice. Now I know better. Now I know that the voice that Sister Dulce heard was a direct manifestation of the voice of God, because God had no intention of letting the future Sister Dulce die."

Like Anne Lamott, Jennifer Moses knows to look for God in both the usual and unusual places -- in the life of her family, in a near fatal car accident, in the Memory Books of her grandmother, in the books her father sends her, in the face of an AIDS patient. And she knows that God enjoys a sense of humor.

She ends this story as she is doing volunteer work in a Baton Rouge shelter for Katrina evacuees, bearing witness once again to the presence of God in every act of kindness, breathing, walking, moving forward, up and onward. This smart, funny, wise book is every kind of song -- part cheering Broadway melody, part devout religious chant, part rousing gospel sing-along -- and Jennifer Moses gets to sing all the parts, in her wisecracking, inviting, distinctive voice. Aren't we all looking for that sign from God? With open eyes and an open heart, we will see them everywhere, just as she did.

. . . . . . .

FROM THE DAILY FORWARD:

In 1995, Moses' husband, Stuart, decides to leave his law practice to take a position teaching law in Baton Rouge, La., where he, his wife and their three young children move. It is a lovely city, but it hardly lacks for challenges, marked as it is by failing public schools, a high occurrence of murder, a rate of AIDS transmission the second-highest in the country, and, perhaps most shocking to Moses, its public displays of affection for Jesus. "You can't live in Baton Rouge without bumping up against Jesus just about every time you walk out of the house," she writes.  "Not only on your doorstep in the form of local missionaries but also on your neighbors' lips, on the towering crosses that dot the highways, on bus stop benches that proclaim JESUS IS THE ANSWER." This blatant religious fervor is new to Moses, and not entirely welcome.

Moses juxtaposes stories of her past experiences-- those in D.C., as well as her post-college life in New York-- with those of her new acquaintances at a rehabilitative home for AIDS patients where she volunteers regularly. There, Moses's search for her own religious heritage is intensified by the well-intentioned women she encounters, women who are certain that Jesus is there with them all the time and that he will appear for Moses, too, when she's ready. These kind patients and caregivers have less materially, but they are filled with faith,  something that Moses envies. "I, too, wanted to be a bright red flame, dancing," she writes. ", too, wanted to be filled with a faith so buoyant that it could carry me beyond myself, beyond sorrow, beyond memory even, and right smack into the embrace of eternity."

by STEVE WEINBERG Writing a memoir is easy. Writing a memoir that's interesting to strangers is difficult. Writing a memoir that's interesting to strangers with spirituality as the text’s connecting thread is really, really difficult—especially if the memoirist is a Jew. After all, memoirs by Jews are mighty prevalent. Jennifer Anne Moses has defied the odds with her memoir Bagels and Grits. Now age 48 and author of a previous memoir titled Food and Whine: Confessions of a New Millennium Mom, Moses has written a gem. Her writing is so strong that almost every sentence is wise, witty, quotable. Her sentences are memorable, the ultimate goal of almost every serious author. In fact, the temptation is to fill this review, assigned at 1,000 words, with a string of her sentences. I write books. I edit books. I review books—lots of them. I read lots more books for sheer pleasure, without reviewing obligations. Maybe one in 10,000 contains superb writing on every page. The conceit of the memoir is simple but effective—Moses alternates portions of her personal story with scenes from an AIDS hospice where she volunteered year after year. Moses never expected to live in Baton Rouge, where perhaps 2,000 Jews are nearly invisible within a population of about 300,000 others. But her lawyer husband Stuart gave up a successful law practice in Washington, D.C., because he wanted to become a law professor. In 1995, Louisiana State University offered a professorship first. The family—Jennifer, Stuart and their three children—made the move. Moses grew up as a mostly secular Jew, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. Her father attended synagogue, more from tradition that from deep-seated religion. Her mother took Judaism less seriously. Moses herself rejected the opportunity to attend Hebrew School and experience a bat mitzvah as a child. In Baton Rouge, however, Jesus showed up everywhere. Nobody in Moses’ life pre-Baton Rouge struck her as deeply religious. In Baton Rouge, almost everybody in Moses’ life seemed deeply religious, especially the mostly African-American staff and patients in the AIDS hospice. The scenes from the hospice are sometimes humorous—even amidst awful suffering and death. They are also touching. Moses has a gift for describing other human beings so well in a few paragraphs that they seem like lifelong acquaintances to a reader. One of the many heroines found in the memoir is Joanna, a deeply religious, long-time caretaker at the AIDS hospice. Joanna has little formal education, but is interested in Moses’ writing. When Moses feels despair at completing what became Bagels and Grits, Joanna persuades her that God will help her finish the manuscript. Thank goodness for Joanna. And maybe for God.