Authors, American -- 20th century -- Biography. |
Mirvis, Tova |
American authors |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
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Searching... New Bedford Free Public Library | B MIRVIS 2017 | BIOGRAPHY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... New Bedford Wilks Branch | B MIRVIS 2017 | BIOGRAPHY | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
The memoir of a woman who leaves her faith and her marriage and sets out to navigate the terrifying, liberating terrain of a newly mapless world
Born and raised in a tight-knit Orthodox Jewish family, Tova Mirvis committed herself to observing the rules and rituals prescribed by this way of life. After all, to observe was to be accepted and to be accepted was to be loved. She married a man from within the fold and quickly began a family.
But over the years, her doubts became noisier than her faith, and at age forty she could no longer breathe in what had become a suffocating existence. Even though it would mean the loss of her friends, her community, and possibly even her family, Tova decides to leave her husband and her faith. After years of trying to silence the voice inside her that said she did not agree, did not fit in, did not believe, she strikes out on her own to discover what she does believe and who she really is. This will mean forging a new way of life not just for herself, but for her children, who are struggling with what the divorce and her new status as "not Orthodox" mean for them.
This is a memoir about what it means to decide to heed your inner compass at long last. To free the part of yourself that has been suppressed, even if it means walking away from the only life you've ever known. Honest and courageous, Tova takes us through her first year outside her marriage and community as she learns to silence her fears and seek adventure on her own path to happiness.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist Mirvis (Visible City) intimately chronicles her divorce and her separation from modern Orthodox Judaism in this bold memoir. After a lifetime devoted to religion and her family, she decided to navigate the secular world for the first time. She became a single parent, sharing custody of her three children with her ex-husband Aaron, whom she met as an undergrad at Columbia University. Throughout, she reflects on both the psychological tension and joy of choosing a new lifestyle, one in which she drives on Shabbat and celebrates new holidays such as Halloween. Her children, too, go through their own transformative relationship to religion: her oldest son, Noam, remained Orthodox, while the middle child, Josh, like her, chose to explore a freedom outside of Orthodox Judaism. He eats nonkosher pizza for the first time and has late-night discussions about whether he believes in God. Mirvis's account focuses less on the oppressiveness she felt within the religion and more on the emotional impact of separating and starting over. Hers is a story of grief and rebirth. She is compassionate and judicious in her portrayal of Orthodox Judaism, even as she describes its repressive attitudes toward women; she also discusses the diverse Jewish lifestyles, from Hasidic to secular. Her personal journey makes for an introspective and fascinating story. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The Orthodox traditions of Judaism, explains Mirvis, enact and memorialize divorce through the preparation and ceremonial presentation of a get, an Aramaic word that can be translated as a book of separation. In her memoir titled for this process, Mirvis chronicles both her separation from her husband of 17 years and the long journey of separation from the Orthodox family, community, and worldview in which she was raised. Looking both backward and forward, Mirvis recounts with candor and close observation the social, psychological, and spiritual travail precipitated by leaving her narrow but well-known world and entering a more secular, unfamiliar territory. Her tale revisits the seeds of doubt that first troubled her as a young, Orthodox woman as well as the upheaval she feared and resisted while those doubts matured into an irresistible urge to depart from all that was intimately familiar to her. Sharing the personal details and drama of her journey, Mirvis recounts the arduous path so many must take to emerge into their own, true identities.--Dworman, Ross Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MARTIN LUTHER: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World, by Eric Metaxas. (Viking, $30.) Metaxas' effort to make Luther attractive to a wide readership presents its subject as a titanic figure who rescued God from medievalism, invented individual freedom and ushered in modernity. THE STORY OF THE JEWS: Volume 2, Belonging: 1492-1900, by Simon Schama. (Ecco, $39.99.) Schama's panoramic study begins around the time of the Spanish Inquisition and ends with the Dreyfus case, circling around the question of whether the Jews could ever find a safe haven. Across four centuries, that quest seemed never quite attainable yet never definitely out of reach. FURNISHING ETERNITY: A Father, a Son, a Coffin, and a Measure of Life, by David Giffels. (Scribner, $24.) Giffels lovingly but never worshipfully traces the craft of coffin-making, and in so doing lets the essence of himself and his father be revealed through the action of building one together. MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE MANUSCRIPTS: Twelve Journeys Into the Medieval World, by Christopher de Hamel. (Penguin Press, $45.) A gloriously illustrated introduction to a collection of extraordinary illuminated books, conducted by a supremely learned and cheerfully opinionated guide. WHAT THE QUR'AN MEANT: And Why It Matters, by Garry Wills. (Viking, $25.) When a leading Catholic intellectual reads the Quran, especially one as attuned to language as Wills, the result is a delight. He challenges religious and secular ignorance, yielding an overview that is both elegant and insightful. THE EXODUS, by Richard Elliott Friedman. (HarperOne, $27.99.) Friedman seeks to answer, once and for all: Was there an exodus from Egypt? He insists there was, just not quite the way the Bible describes; his Exodus story is really the tale of how the people we call Levites left Egypt and joined up with the Israelites already in Canaan. WHERE THE WILD COFFEE GROWS: The Untold Story of Coffee From the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup, by Jeff Koehler. (Bloomsbury, $28.) An absorbing, almost Tolkienesque narrative of politics, ecology and economics that documents the spread of (the misnamed) Coffea Arabica. THE BOOK OF SEPARATION: A Memoir, by Tova Mirvis. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.) Mirvis tells an intimate tale of departure - of leaving the Modern Orthodox community that served as the inspiration for her first two novels, and of leaving her marriage too. She movingly conveys the heartache that accompanies the abandonment of one way of life in search of another. SLEEP NO MORE, by P. D. James. (Knopf, $21.) Half a dozen murderous tales from the late great crime fiction writer. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Kirkus Review
A novelist's account of how she broke away from Orthodox Judaism to make a new life in the secular world.Mirvis (Visible City, 2014, etc.) grew up in an observant Jewish family that believed "without God there is no meaning. Without the Torah, there is no goodness." Though outwardly obedient to the tenants of her faith, she privately questioned the truth of what she was taught. After graduating from high school, the author went to Israel. For one year, she immersed herself in the study of Jewish religious texts and prayed to be forgiven for her willful ways. "I used to be a little bad," she writes, "but now I was becoming entirely good." When Mirvis began attending Columbia University, she "made few friends who weren't Orthodox." By the end of her senior year, she had married a fellow Orthodox Jew who had none of the dramatic "hard edges" other crushes had possessed in abundance. Fearful of her own rogue impulses, Mirvis strove to be a model Orthodox Jewish wife. She kept Shabbat and a kosher home, and she covered her hair and body according to traditional rules that governed married women. But the inner voice that had caused her to question her faith as a young girl and the self that could not fully reconcile her feminism with Orthodox teachings would not be silenced. Her first "rebellions" consisted of wearing pants and uncovering her hair. They became more pronounced when she began telling stories about Orthodox characters that "wrestled, doubted, and strayed." Realizing she needed freedom to express a truth that had been trapped within her, she began the difficult journey that led her out of her marriage and away from Orthodox Judaism. The author's sensitive thematic treatment of belonging and individuality and her candor about the terror she experienced leaving the only community she had ever known makes for moving, inspiring reading. A thoughtful, courageous memoir of family, religion, and self-discovery. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Novelist Mirvis (The Ladies Auxiliary) has fallen out of love with both her husband and Orthodox Judaism-and is struggling not only to articulate what that means to her but also how to define such disconnection. -Mirvis is not in limbo throughout this book. As she begins her memoir, she documents what it feels like to leave her husband and religion; her only hint at what caused the break is that she can no longer "shape myself into a form that felt too tight." The author has shared custody of three -school-age -children and a budding romance, both of which she negotiates with gentle aplomb. Her interior narrative voice draws readers in, asking if she can be loved for who she is, not who she was, especially in her withdrawal from her natal religion. VERDICT A soothing picture of personal and religious divorce.-SC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.