Shanda: The Making and Breaking of a Self-Loathing Jew [Hardcover]

Neal Karlen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 2004

Early in his memoir, Neal Karlen tells a rabbi, "I love Judaism. It's Jews I can't stand."

What he means is that he hates the parochialism and material trappings of the young Jews he knows: Their new temples are gilded and the parking lots spill over with luxury cars. Religion for them is a quest for a Jewish wife from "the right" family and a big house and splendid clothes. Gone is the soulful practice of tradition that his grandparents brought over from Russia. Karlen sees communities from New York to Los Angeles of Jewish status seekers and he can't stand the thought of being identified as one of them.

Frustrated and embarrassed, Karlen stops looking for the Jewish enclave that fits him and, for the next ten years, simply rejects Judaism. He antagonizes rabbis. He becomes the token Jew among his Midwestern friends and the buffoon at cocktail parties with a shtick of Jewish jokes and imitations that cross the line. And then one day, Karlen goes too far: he marries a blue-eyed Protestant from a family with an anti-Semitic bent. The marriage is doomed.

At midlife Karlen discovers that he belongs nowhere and that the Jew he really hates is himself. He is a shanda -- a shame.

Written with irreverent zest and poignancy, Shanda is Karlen's story of finding his way back to Judaism -- and the Jewish community. His guide is an unlikely one: Rabbi Manis Friedman, the renowned Hasidic scholar with a beard to his chest and a fedora that makes him look like "Sam Spade about to go out in the rain." The rabbi invites Karlen to study with him. In their weekly meetings devoted to scholarship and Jewish ritual, Karlen asks the questions that assimilated Jews grapple with, such as "How do we bring meaning to the practice of Judaism?" "Where is the line between Jewish and too Jewish?" and "What does it mean to be Jewish-American and ashamed by Judaism?" Rabbi Friedman leads Karlen up the mountain to find these answers -- and shows both author and reader the stunning view from the top.

Ultimately, this odd couple discovers what it means to be a good person -- not just a good Jew. At its heart, Shanda is about their surprising friendship and the ways that people change -- and change each other. At once hilarious and heartbreaking, it is a parable for anyone who has ever questioned his faith or has lost his way.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[A] stirring journey with a surprising and deeply moving conclusion."

-- Forward

"What makes this personal account of self-dividedness so riveting is the ferocious honesty with which the author exposes his wound and the clarity and humor which seem testimony enough to its healing."

-- Philip Lopate

"Shanda should be sold in a plain brown wrapper -- Neal Karlen's self-examination of his internal identity conflicts is that honest and disturbing."

--Sara Nelson, New York Post

"Shanda reads much like Tuesdays with Morrie but has a wry irreverence and a seething edge. Karlen's memoir is an alternately hilarious and heart-wrenching spiritual adventure."

-- The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

"Poignant and original...Karlen's personal saga shows that while there is no one set way to reconnect with your Jewish heart, the journey is always rich and fulfilling."

-- Stephen Fried, author of The New Rabbi

"If you like scary beginnings, Neal Karlen's memoir is the book for you...The amazing thing here is not how dramatically Karlen turns himself around but how astutely he chronicles the turnaround. Shanda is hilarious, heartbreaking, seething, wary, and joyful -- in a word, a marvel."

-- Stephen J. Dubner, author of Turbulent Souls and coauthor, Freakonomics --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Neal Karlen writes regularly for The New York Times and is a member of the adjunct faculty of the University of Minnesota journalism school. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Elle, The Forward, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and Olam, among other publications. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone (August 17, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743213823
• ISBN-13: 978-0743213820
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,333,815 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Loved it -- funny, touching and truly original, August 26, 2004

By 

Josephine Gould (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shanda: The Making and Breaking of a Self-Loathing Jew (Hardcover)

I've never read anything like "Shanda." Is it meta-memoir, spiritual quest by way of Socrates, bittersweet sketch of Minneapolis' inner life, updated Lenny Bruce routine, erudite Jewish-American history (Sandy Koufax, Philip Roth, Abbie Hoffman, and all), or essential guidebook for anyone alienated from his family, city, and faith -- not to mention himself? All of the above, which is quite a feat on Neal Karlen's part. Karlen has covered plenty of subjects in his long journalism career, from Henny Youngman to punk rock to Prince to Bill Murray and the St. Paul Saints. Now it seems as though all those years of observation of other conflicted characters were leading up to this: a searingly honest self-examination -- which somehow avoids becoming maudlin or self-indulgent -- in the vein of the classical philosophers.

Or, more to the point, of the rabbis Karlen consults (and befriends) in his hunger for religious meaning and a release from his paralyzing doubt about Jewishness and masculinity. Given the serious subject, it helps a lot that Karlen's endlessly inventive wit is on display here, but the book isn't "Seinfeld," for all its riffs. This is the machine of a soul at work, and it took guts and skill to show it to us so transparently. Karlen is an immensely appealing character who gives up insulting himself for a humility he can live with -- one that's reverent yet still quirkily skeptical. And when he does break through in moments of delighted pride, the reader will be delighted in turn. Highly recommended for everyone who's still searching, whatever your religion.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Genuine Mensch, August 27, 2004

By 

Solly K. Minkton - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shanda: The Making and Breaking of a Self-Loathing Jew (Hardcover)

Any book which starts with a pork sandwich binge and ends with a Bat Mitzvah has got to be good! All kidding aside, Mr. Karlen knows from contradictions, and they are all here: his interfaith marriage, good laughter versus schtick, learning to listen instead of talk, limitations of the Torah and the gifts, obsession with history while living in modern America, honoring his parents and rebelling against them, and so on. Mr. Karlen speaks of longing to attain a 'Yiddishe hartz', a warm Jewish heart. And this is exactly what he achieves through struggle, study and sometimes outrageous humor. Whether he was ever really a 'shanda' could be debated, but by the end of this book he is all the mensch he could ever have hoped to be, good to his friends, his family, Rabbi Friedman and himself. I found this book a pleasure to read and a perfect gift for family members (especially younger ones) who are compelled but confused about Judaism. Mr. Karlen doesn't preach or pretend to be perfect but tells an honest story that's very entertaining into the bargain.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars tuesdays with Manis, September 23, 2004

By 

birdie blue (usa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shanda: The Making and Breaking of a Self-Loathing Jew (Hardcover)

"Shanda" as Neal Karlin explains in his fascinating, irreverent, humorous and touchingly poignant new book of the same name means `shame' as in `you're a shanda to the Jewish people.' It is Karlin's own deeply rooted and misplaced shame at being a Jew that forms the backdrop for the book in which he deftly takes the reader with him on his odyssey of transformation from self-loathing to self-discovery.

Karlin's metamorphosis is hugely aided and abetted by Rabbi Manis Friedman, an unlikely Merlin, with his chest length white beard, long black frock and black hat; the self described "Hasid that everyone likes."

When we first meet Karlin, who grew up in a traditional Conservative Jewish home in Minneapolis, he has rejected all the tenets of Judaism, right down to marrying the proverbial "shiksa", the blonde, gentile girl who is "every Jewish mother's nightmare."
The marriage is a non-starter and quickly ends in divorce, leaving Karlin with the uneasy feeling that he brought shame on his family for naught. "It was a shanda for me. By exiling myself from my own tribe and lusting to be anyone, anything else at all, I'd in fact become nothing."

It is at this point in Karlin's downward spiral that he has a chance encounter with Rabbi Friedman on a flight from Los Angeles to Minneapolis; although he would later learn that in Judaism there are no `chance' encounters, there is only Divine Providence.

"When I sat down next to a Hasidic rabbi, I did not know at the time that I would have one of the most mind-quaking revelations of my life. I didn't see G-d, but I began, for the first time in memory to see myself. Do the Hasidim believe in reincarnation? I asked. He looked at me and smiled. I believe you can be reincarnated in your own lifetime."

And thus began the relationship between the `odd couple' - the Jew who was obsessed with the horrors of the Holocaust, but refused to identify with the joy of Judaism and the kindly, wise, witty and reticent Hasidic rabbi who only talked when it was necessary to jolt Karlin's neshama, his Jewish soul, into high gear.

Karlin is a gifted writer who never talks down to his readers even when employing the dozens of Yiddishisms that are disbursed throughout the book like so many juicy tidbits that make the reading of it ever more delightful. "A mentsch is nebekh nit mer vi a mentsch, un amol, dos oykh nit." A person is only a person -and sometimes not even that.

Peppered also throughout the book is the author's prodigious repertoire of Henny Youngman one-liners; self deprecating jokes that are Karlin's trademark and his nemesis. "Why do Jewish men die before their wives? Because they want to."

The book is written over the course of a year, during which Karlin and Rabbi Friedman meet regularly for schmoozing, learning and noshing. Friedman seems to spin a mystical web, drawing Karlin inexorably closer to his father, his grandfather and his people until at long last he is comfortable in his own skin.

"The purpose of life" Friedman says, is "the absolute conviction that when G-d creates human beings, He doesn't do it in masses. The point is that we are individuals, and that we are able to do the Mitzvot, (commandments) for G-d in our own way, the best we can."

And that's a message everyone can take to heart.