My Jewish Face and Other Stories

By Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

Book Overview

My Jewish Face & Other Stories chronicles the coming of age and coming out of a daughter of the Jewish left. Wandering from Brooklyn to Harlem and Berkeley in the sixties, from the intense feminist politics of the seventies to the isolation and regathering of activism in the eighties, Kaye/Kantrowitz's women struggle for lesbian community, for proud Jewish identity and always for justice steeped in compassion. As humanly warm and funny as they are serious, these stories will reach with great hope and energy across generations and across cultures.

I like this book a lot. It's full of history, herstories and plain stories--and in beautiful combination and variety--all bringing the truth, the angry adversarial truth, the happy love-finding truth of our women's movement years. --Grace Paley, writer and activist

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz is a lesbian writer who does not stint in these fictional explorations. Her writing sacrifices neither clarity nor depth. As she recreates the contexts of our lives she gives us back our own voices. --Judith McDaniel, poet, essayist, activist

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz's stories are urgently, often brutally honest...I came away from My Jewish Face as if from a roomful of vivid and articulate people who have discovered they have nothing left to hide. I value Kaye/Kantrowitz's voice for everything it says that comforts and everything that hurts--this is a sharp, sad, funny document of difficult times and I hope it falls into many, many hungry hands. --Rosellen Brown, novelist and poet

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0933216718
• ISBN13: 9780933216716
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Aunt Lute Books
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Read this Book!

My Jewish Face & Other Stories is an amazing collection of interconnected short stories that tackle the issues of Jewish identity, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, social activism, rape, lesbian relationships, parent-child relationships....and the list goes on. Surprisingly, I didn't feel overwhelmed. Kaye/Kantrowitz's poetic writing style gives such attention to detail that it can address big issues without becoming convoluded and confusing. She doesn't try to "solve" anything; she just shows how these issues manifest themselves in her different characters. As a young, heterosexual, non-Jewish woman, I had a little trouble relating to the characters, but through my struggle to understand them, I learned a lot about a culture different from mine. I laughed, I nearly cried, and I couldn't put this book down. The ending left me stunned and gave me A LOT to contemplate. Read this book with an open mind, and you will be glad you did.