Ilana M. Blumberg

A literate and literary memoir of a woman who grew up trying to reconcile the worlds of Orthodox Judaism and secularism and feminism. Blumberg explains very well the balancing act she didn't even know she was performing until she went to school in Israel, and her work is imbued with the love of books both Jewish and non-Jewish. There are parts of her story I don't enjoy as much, particularly when she imagines what it was like for young men studying at yeshiva or talks about her own yearnings in metaphors and similes that I can't quite get my head around. But that could just be me preferring memoirs to be in plain prose and more like fact than fiction.… (mere)