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Howard Jacobson

Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews Paperback – August 1, 1995

by Howard Jacobson (Author)

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When fast-breaking political events forced British novelist Jacobson (Peeping Tom) to put off a trip to Lithuania planned as a search for his Jewish roots, he accepted an offer from the BBC to visit Jewish communities around the globe instead. This informed and witty account of his experiences deals with the wide variety of contemporary Jewish life, as well as with how Jacobson's observations affected his own concept of what it means to be a Jew. Riding an emotional roller coaster, he witnessed the hostility between Jews and African Americans in New York City, attended services in a gay synagogue in California and found his basic cynicism about religion reinforced after he spent time with Orthodox Jews in Israel, although his spirits were lifted by a visit to an idealistic, tolerant Israeli kibbutz. His journey concluded with the postponed trip to Lithuania, where the author found virulent anti-Semitism. The book has been adapted for a forthcoming BBC/PBS documentary.

Print length

502 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Abrams Press
Publication date

August 1, 1995
Dimensions

5 x 1 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0879516054
ISBN-13

978-0879516055
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Howard Jacobson was born on August 25, 1942 in Manchester, England. He is a Man Booker Prize-winning British author and journalist. He studied English at Downing College, Cambridge under F. R. Leavis. He lectured for three years at the University of Sydney before returning to England to teach at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His later teaching posts included a period at Wolverhampton Polytechnic from 1974 to 1980. His time at Wolverhampton was to form the basis of his first novel, Coming from Behind, a campus comedy about a failing polytechnic that plans to merge facilities with a local football club. He also wrote a travel book in 1987, titled In the Land of Oz, which was researched during his time as a visiting academic in Sydney. His fiction, particularly in the six novels he has published since 1998, is characterized chiefly by a discursive and humorous style. His 1999 novel The Mighty Walzer, about a teenage table tennis champion, won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing. In October 2010 Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Finkler Question, which was the first comic novel to win the prize since Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils in 1986. In 2013 he made The New York Times Best Seller List with his title Whole Rethinking the Science of Nutrition which he co-authored with T. Colin Campbell.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Abrams Press; 1st edition (August 1, 1995)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 502 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0879516054
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0879516055
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.54 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 1 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #764,601 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #106 in General Israel Travel Guides
- #2,646 in Jewish History (Books)
- #5,336 in Traveler & Explorer Biographies

Customer Reviews:
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Top reviews from the United States

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Harmon Spolan

Thoroughly enjoyable Jewish travel stories

Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2010

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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.

4 people found this helpful

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geoffatmhg

If you believe in God dont read it.

Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2015

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Acerbic, irreverent, hysterical, mickey taking, sad and quite brilliant.

2 people found this helpful

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Rosemary

Wanderings and wondering

Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2013

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The book took the reader to interesting places and introduced interesting people. But there was a curious lack of "glue" to the narrative. The "why" of the endeavor always came to mind.

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Choux Goûter

An unintentionally revealing report by Jacobson on his own conflicted identity

Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2011

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.

2 people found this helpful

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R.W.A.

Lighten Up, Why Don't You?

Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2001

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.

7 people found this helpful

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Sharon Saunders

Oh, please!

Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 1999

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.

3 people found this helpful

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Esther Nebenzahl

Identity crisis

Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 1999

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!"

2 people found this helpful

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David Hill

If you want to know where you're from, take a look around...

Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2007

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?

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Top reviews from other countries

eileen holroydE. Holroyd

Wonderfully written

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 30, 2013

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An enlightening, humorous accoung of Jacobson's journey to trace his roots. The ending is incredibly sad and powerful, stays in the memory a long tine afterwards.

One person found this helpful

jojodoc

An interesting book.

Reviewed in Canada on January 8, 2021

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This book is written by someone who is "Jewish" rather than someone who is a "Jew" to misquote Jonathan Miller. A bit like me, who grew up in a secular Jewish household, had a Bar Mitzvah more for appearance sake, never returned to the reform synagogue again and married a non Jewish girl. The accounts of the crazy ultra orthodox cults were disturbing, as was the rule that a male corpse could only have a Jewish funeral if a post mortem circumcision was performed. It confirmed to me that there will always be antisemitism which may boil over again as it did in 1930s nazi Germany. The "God Delusion" was front and centre.

Tajinder

Five Stars

Reviewed in India on July 22, 2018

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Nice quality

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Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews Paperback – August 1, 1995

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