Customer Reviews

Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

No hatred in this book, although plenty in the remarks of two of the on-line reviewers who are like bit part players in the book itself. Jacobson is erudite, fair, modest, compassionate and compelling. He doesn't pretend to be writing an academic investigation, more a personal journey, and he has the decency to admit that it's an inconclusive one. There is, of course, no point in spending time and money on a book like this if you lack learning and humour, of if you believe that on matters of religion and identity you already have all the answers.

Howard Jacobson has written a very funny, sometimes poignant, and always insightful book about his travels to various Jewish Communities in the US, Europe, and Israel. His wit is rapier sharp, and his commentaries are always right on the spot. I found myself laughing out loud, and annoying my wife by reading long passages to her, thereby spoiling her fun.

Roots, Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews is, first of all, funny. One should not come to it expecting to read a balanced, well-researched history/sociology of Judaism, Israel or the Diaspora. Think more along the lines of taking a long, relaxed (but neurotic as all get-out) trip with a very funny man in search of something even he can't quite identify.The chapters describing his time in the US are hilarious and poignant at once. The chapters on Israel are quite well done, capturing the author's exasperated love for the nation and its people, and his often wayward search for justice. Jacobson tries to avoid sentiment at all costs, yet continually finds himself caught up short by a lump in the throat. A very good, very funny travel book. A very good, very funny story of one person's hunt for himself. Not for the compulsively or competitively serious.

Despite its faults--and there are many--this books opens up an important and much neglected area--how disaffected Jews relate to their own religious identity. The author is able to use humor effectively to blow up the pieties of those who cling to unexamined views of what that identity does or should consist of for themselves and others. There are a dearth of such books and Jacobson is brave for going into unchartered territiory. The problems are that Jacobson is somewhat lazy in his approach--chooses to interview at length a random set of people and fails to do background research that can place some of the views espoused in some sort of perspective. Where the book works is when he arrives in Israel and gets caught up in the lives of some vividly drawn representatives from that country. The Israeli chapters bring out what the author does best --allowing the reader to understand the nuances in his interviewees' own positions as well as the authors' own. The chapter featuring his search for his own roots in Lithunia was close to brilliant. The book badly lacks a closing chapter that is able to put the contemporary Jews dilemmma in a wider historical, literary and philosophical perspective.

This book, hastily churned out after a BBC-sponsored junket meant to provide a light and humorous view of Jewish culture and identity around the world, is irritating as a travelogue. Yet it is revealing of a British Jew in the early 1990s unsure of what to do with his own Jewish identity. Jacobson, at the time he wrote this book, knew little about Judaism; nonetheless, he spends pages torn between apologising for and defending his marriage to a Catholic from unseen challengers.

Jacobson travels lightly through different Jewish environments, learning nothing. His specialty is ridiculing other Jews: whether painted seniors at Catskill retreats, kind and welcoming Chabadniks, National Zionists, Reform, Reconstructionist, Gay and Messianic Jews. But he is uncomfortable with observant Jews, he realizes that as someone whose professional identity is as a Jew, he should know more, and his embarrassment over his ignorance makes him churlishly and even scabrously mocking. Often he projects sexuality onto the religious as a way of consoling himself. Jacobson is selling himself, a Jew-flavored literary product, to the gentiles, and even his wife has bought him under these pretenses, yet he has no Jewish stuffing in him to convince other Jews. Much of the book is spent searching for someone in the exact same position as his, and he is thrilled to meet a friend in NY with whom to ridicule other Jews, but their community-of-two is clearly a terminal phase for Jewish life.

There are occasional moments of humour and insight, as when he ridicules the Jewish nostalgia for a shtetl life "we wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole if it were offered to us today", but Jacobson is simply too unaware of his inner conflict to be funny most of the time, and appears acid and cruel.

Jacobson has since changed his relationship to Judaism, moving far from the mocking unease he exhibits in this book, and even marrying the Jewish producer of the Roots Schmoots series. Today's Booker Prize winner goes to Hadassah book clubs, unimaginable for the protagonist of this snide travelogue. So much the better, because the reader of Roots Schmoots just wants Jacobson to make up his mind: "in or out?". He seems to have done so.

Howard Jacobson is Jewish, of Lithuanian extraction and was born in Manchester. This book looks hard at Jewishness and takes us all over the world in search of what it means. I really wish he'd spent more time looking what part Manchester played in developing his sense of who he is and where he came from.

Question: There's lots of talk about Yiddish, what part did native languages play in the various countries Jews settled in?

Where does the man get the nerve?

Can you imagine going into a country for the first time and forming an opinion of its religion, people, customs, culture and esthetics by conversations with street people, going to hangouts of the marginal in Israeli society and staying at the tackiest of hotels?

As an Israeli citizen, born and raised in New York, with a healthy dose of NY culture and esthetics, I really took umbrage - did the man really find no beautiful buildings (the new Supreme Court building is georgeous, just to name one), no lovely hotels (too bad he couldn't afford the Laromme, the Dan Pearl or the new Hilton)or pretty residential areas (like the lovely old, landscaped Talbeya)?

As for cultured people, why couldn't the man get thru the front door to interview Amos Oz, Yehuda Amichai or a dozen other cultured, pluristic, highly intelligent fellow authors?

I notice that he changed the cover of his book - good, because his face on the old one wasn't too esthetically pleasing. Maybe the negative things he felt about Israel were just manifestations of the negative things he finds about himself.

Get some therapy soon, Mr. Jacobson.

Mr. Jacobson suffers from a deep-rooted identity crisis and his book could be of some use for anyone who is interested in this sort of behavior pattern. In terms of literary value "Roots Schoots" lacks intellectual depth. Mr. Jacobson is full of hate, prejudice, and uses irony, skepticism, and in many instances disrespect for the values imbedded in Jewish culture. He needs to solve his own dilemma first, free himself from whatever traumas he might have and then repeat his journey with a more open mind. Only then will he be able to judge "jewishness!"