What a great storyteller! Wendy Doniger is always both witty and brilliant.
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“Many memories, many myths”—this is how Wendy Doniger begins the story of her parents’ origins in Europe and sharply bifurcated life in America. Recalling their contrasting attitudes toward Judaism and religion in general—and acknowledging the mythologized narratives that keep bubbling up in those recollections—Doniger tells the story of their childhoods, their unusual marriage, their life in the post–World War II Jewish enclave of Great Neck, New York, and her own complex relationship with each of them.
What a great storyteller! Wendy Doniger is always both witty and brilliant.
Annie Dillard
What a great storyteller! Wendy Doniger is always both witty and brilliant.
Wendy Doniger has taught us how to think about myths. Now she turns her shining pen to her own most intimate ones. In these pages you will find pearls her parents taught her: tricks for turning traffic lights green; how to wear a space-helmet with a dinner dress. You will find as well a loving and witty memoir by an intellectual giant about the lost microcosm that nourished her exuberant growth. And if you are at all like me, you will laugh and you will cry.
It’s wholly fitting and wholly pleasing that Wendy Doniger-one of our great authorities on the process of myth-making and the myths of other cultures-should turn her creative and critical attention to myths made at home. The Donigers of Great Neck-with its gallery of eccentrics, its vivid characters and generations at their song-is a delight and an instruction from first to final page.
Walking through the snow to see Wendy at the stately, gracious home of Rita and Lester Doniger will forever remain in my memory.
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