A Jewish Appendix by Adam Sobsey
Adam Sobsey is a playwright and sportswriter; he’s written a biography of Chrissie Hynde and essays for the Paris Review. He’s also Jewish, and at the beginning of his latest book, he seems uncertain of what that means. He has a clearer picture by the end.
A Jewish Appendix is an engaging travelog and a highly personal odyssey. The author zigzags across continents in a search that appears unconscious, at least in the earlier years recorded in his account. During a sojourn in Jakarta, Indonesia, what did he do? Holed up in a friend’s bungalow, he struggled to finish a play about Ezra Pound, an interesting but unpleasant man, a signal modernist poet and a raging antisemite.
Sobsey was raised in a nonobservant home; he was aware of being Jewish, felt ties to his extended Jewish family but never received much in the way of instruction on what this might mean. On big city streets he was of “indeterminate ethnic origin.” He didn’t know what shul meant until well underway with this book. He would learn many things on his journey, especially about himself.
One of the impulses behind A Jewish Appendix was that very American desire to see where the family tree was planted, to find roots, even if you have no desire to embrace them. Sobsey’s ancestors immigrated from Romania, and he was determined to visit this not entirely happy homeland; many of his ancestors settled in Pittsburgh, “one of the most Jewish places in the world,” he writes, circa 1900. His extended family had ties to the Pittsburgh synagogue attacked by a militant antisemite in 2018, and while in the city he attended Shabbos services for the first time in ages.
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Sobsey arrives at some positive conclusions about his Jewish identity by the end of a memoir that travels through universal topics, including family and marriage, the brokenness of memory, the long chains of complicity, the changes wrought by time and the uncertain boundaries of nationality. A Jewish Appendix will speak to anyone of any background trying to make sense of the nature and nurture behind who they are.
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