Too Jewish: Book 1, The Cooper Family Saga Kindle Edition

Patty Friedman's book, Too Jewish, is a touching and emotional look at the story of a family forever changed by the Holocaust. Young Bernie Cooper (Bernard Kuper), a well educated German Jew, escapes Europe at the last possible moment. Despite desperate attempts to persuade his widowed mother to leave Germany for the U.S., she stays behind and is soon lost to the atrocities of World War II.

Bernie reaches the U.S., meets Lettie a nice Jewish girl from New Orleans, and the two fall in love and marry. But when Bernie marries Lettie,, he commits not only to Lettie, but to her family. Lettie is fifth generation New Orleans, and the only child of a wealthy and well-established Jewish family. For this family, assimilation has long been established by the shedding of ethnic specificity--and Bernie is definitely TOO Jewish. What happens when Bernard Kuper is forced into a new life as Bernie Cooper?

There are several parts to Too Jewish. First you have Bernie, a young man, a Jew, who escapes the clutches of Hitler and Nazi Germany just before his homeland is invaded. He has tried to talk his 70 year old mother, who believes it is just another war, into coming with him and fails. Leaving her behind, he comes to America, meets a girl, falls in love with the girl, joins the American military and fights for the freedom of Germany and Jews. When he returns he meets the girl's parents, who are stuck up and ashamed of being Jews themselves.

As the years go by, Bernie and Letty marry, have a daughter and constantly have to battle her parents (especially her mother's) underhanded and cruel tricks and scorn. Letty's parents have turned their back on their heritage & raised their daughter to do the same - but she is a fighter, loves her man and stands up for her husband and his faith and tries to do the right thing.

I really enjoyed Too Jewish. It's an easy read, very well written and a first hand account of a terrible period of human history. As I read Too Jewish, I was saddened by not only the loss of Bernie's mother and homeland & the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of God's People destroyed by the selfish hatred of one man and those he deceived into following him. There is true horror on Bernie's part of what happens to his mother and a deep sense of shock and betrayal of the American Jews who have turned their back on their heritage and the faith of their ancestor's. He is known as being "Too Jewish" in the synagogue and the Jewish community he has chosen - why? Because he knows the Hebrew prayers, wears his Kippot during worship and keeps the Sabbath.

I recommend this book for anyone that enjoys autobiographies or period type books.Read more ›

Set primarily in post-war New Orleans, this novel presents the classic conflict faced by Jewish immigrants: assimilation versus preservation of culture, customs, and faith. Patty Friedmann's novel takes us on a journey that poignantly shows how Bernie's struggle shaped the lives of those he loved best. Along the way we enter Lettie's world complete with the excitement of new love, the pressures of "keeping up with the Goldbergs," and the drama that ensues when a daughter's independence clashes with her mother's love and longings. Read this with a box of tissues . . . or a bag of Zapp's, but read it. Whether you know from New Orleans or not, this novel will stay with you because these characters will enter your heart.

This book is a novel heavily influenced by the author's history of her family. She tells the story of her father, a German Jew who escaped Nazi Germany leaving his mother behind, who suffered survivor guilt all his life. He married an assimilated JAP in New Orleans and experienced rejection by his in-laws all his life for being "too Jewish". Apparently it's a fact that when his mother-in-law died she left the daughter's portion of the estate in trust so that she could only claim it after her "too Jewish" husband died. If anybody ever deserved to be buried in the basement it's this mother-in-law, I've rarely experienced such viceral revulsion reading about a character and I'm sorry that her daughter and son-in-law didn't leave New Orleans and have a completely different life away from the toxic influence of this evil woman. Yeah, she reminds me of my mother. Why do you ask?

The author's father did not end up as badly as the father character in the novel but it is clear that most of the recounting of the history of this man is based on fact. Significantly, the author's grandparent's and mother are now dead so she has been able to write what she pleases about them. As she recounts in an interview (search youtube for the author's name), she was born to write this book.

I'm not Jewish but this book had such moving and affecting passages that at times I had to put the book aside to digest what I'd read and compose myself to read more. A very powerful account of the cruelty of which human beings are capable, whether they use the macro weapons of the Nazis or the micro weapons of social rejection at a tea party.

I'm not sure which is more striking about Patty Friednmann's "Too Jewish"-- the fact that it was more or less biographical, or the fact that she writes so distinctly, or the fact that she conveys her father's emotions so well, it makes "Too Jewish" almost too painful to read. But read you must, because this book opens the door that hides some of the more insidious aspects of surviving the Holocaust.

In the first chapter, Bernie foresees the coming problems for Jews in Germany. He leaves, but his mother refuses too. He goes to New York, but enlists in the service, and is sent to New Orleans. Here, he meets Lettie, the love of his life, and one of the few Jewish families living in the South at the time. So what's the problem? Lettie's family members are Jew-hating Jews. To use Bernie's words, "I will always be a German Jew. Not a Jew in Germany, which is punishable by death. Rather, I am a Jew with an accent and a tenth-grade education in the South, which is punishable by contempt."

Not since Mary Glickman's "Home in the Morning" have I read such an insightful interpretation of the pre-1965 Jewish experience in the south.