A Steaming Pot of Literary Gumbo

By STEVE WEINBERG

BAGELS AND GRITS
A Jew on the Bayou
By Jennifer Anne Moses
166 pages. University of Wisconsin Press. $26.95.

Writing a memoir is easy. Writing a memoir that's interesting to strangers is difficult. Writing a memoir that's interesting to strangers with spirituality as the text’s connecting thread is really, really difficult—especially if the memoirist is a Jew. After all, memoirs by Jews are mighty prevalent.

Jennifer Anne Moses has defied the odds with her memoir Bagels and Grits. Now age 48 and author of a previous memoir titled Food and Whine: Confessions of a New Millennium Mom, Moses has written a gem. Her writing is so strong that almost every sentence is wise, witty, quotable. Her sentences are memorable, the ultimate goal of almost every serious author.

In fact, the temptation is to fill this review, assigned at 1,000 words, with a string of her sentences. I write books. I edit books. I review books—lots of them. I read lots more books for sheer pleasure, without reviewing obligations. Maybe one in 10,000 contains superb writing on every page.

I cannot help myself. Please, read a few passages of Moses’ prose. Then I will get to the guts of the memoir. Promise.

·      When Moses thinks about religious history, she tries to puzzle out, as she phrases it, “How did an illiterate Jewish carpenter get promoted to God?” She continues, “It’s one of those tricky little questions that most Jews I know, myself included, try to avoid talking about in polite company, but the truth is that most Jews… just don’t get Christianity, viewing it as an ever-changing mishmash of conflicting stories, all of them resting on the head of this poor schmuck of a Jewish boy who was hideously tortured to death. And then that same Jewish boy—or rather, his teachings—are twisted and twisted beyond recognition, to be used as justification to vilify and harm Jews, homosexuals, women, Muslims, or, depending on the century, all of the above. This is, as my mother would say, completely meshugge.”

·      As an adult with children, Moses decides to study for her bat mitzvah. Her father, an elderly, cerebral lawyer who grew up in an observant Baltimore household, begins sending her tomes of Jewish thought. Moses reacts by commenting, “I really do love to read, and can’t imagine anything worse than life without books (except maybe life without hamburgers), but I tend to go for books with plot—novels, histories, biographies, memoir. So every time I saw a UPS truck pull up to the curb, I felt like I was trapped in that bad dream where it’s the day of the final exam, only you kind of forgot to attend even a single lecture. When Dad called to ask me what I thought about, for example, Gershom Sholem’s descriptions of kabbalistic emanation theory, I’d mumble something along the lines of ‘interesting,’ and then claim that I had to go and scrape a kid off the sidewalk or take Sam to the orthodontist.”

·      While living with her family in Glasgow, Scotland, during her husband’s sabbatical year, Moses learns she has breast cancer. At first, she feels alone, but kindnesses pour in from across the globe. “I soon began hearing from both sides of the Atlantic that Catholics were lighting candles for me, Baptists were stomping and dancing, Jews were praying for a refuah shlemah (a complete healing), and in upstate New York my friend Alice’s Buddhist mother’s monk was chanting. My husband told people, ‘Jennifer’s not taking any chances.’ But as far as I was concerned, I was merely asking for help. In Baton Rouge, God regularly makes personal appearances to the faithful and even shows up on billboards along I-10, where He proclaims His Word and then signs off with His Name. My favorite billboard is the one that hovers along a particularly ugly stretch of the interstate between the old riverfront downtown and the petrochemical plants that cluster north of the airport. ‘Looking for a sign from God?’ it says. ‘Here it is!’”

As her memoir progresses, the previously unbelieving Moses wonders if perhaps she has been failing to decipher signs from God or Jesus all her life.

The conceit of the memoir is simple but effective—Moses alternates portions of her personal story with scenes from an AIDS hospice where she volunteered year after year.

Moses never expected to live in Baton Rouge, where perhaps 2,000 Jews are nearly invisible within a population of about 300,000 others. But her lawyer husband Stuart gave up a successful law practice in Washington, D.C., because he wanted to become a law professor. In 1995, Louisiana State University offered a professorship first. The family—Jennifer, Stuart and their three children—made the move.

Moses grew up as a mostly secular Jew, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. Her father attended synagogue, more from tradition that from deep-seated religion. Her mother took Judaism less seriously. Moses herself rejected the opportunity to attend Hebrew School and experience a bat mitzvah as a child.

In Baton Rouge, however, Jesus showed up everywhere. Nobody in Moses’ life pre-Baton Rouge struck her as deeply religious. In Baton Rouge, almost everybody in Moses’ life seemed deeply religious, especially the mostly African-American staff and patients in the AIDS hospice.

The scenes from the hospice are sometimes humorous—even amidst awful suffering and death. They are also touching. Moses has a gift for describing other human beings so well in a few paragraphs that they seem like lifelong acquaintances to a reader. One of the many heroines found in the memoir is Joanna, a deeply religious, long-time caretaker at the AIDS hospice. Joanna has little formal education, but is interested in Moses’ writing. When Moses feels despair at completing what became Bagels and Grits, Joanna persuades her that God will help her finish the manuscript. Thank goodness for Joanna. And maybe for God.