Jew Boy: A Memoir

Kaufman's unique voice, by turns manic and wretched, is always intoxicated with language. It was formed in the teeming streets of New York. Kaufman's writing can make gorgeous dreams of some of his most disturbing memories. At its heart-and a great big heart it is-Jew Boy is a classic, if wholly unconventional, American coming-of-age story.

Kaufman is able to combine humor and pathos with a cold-blooded sense of irony in his chilling descriptions of uncovering his identity. Frightening and deeply moving, Jew Boy is a remarkable document.

Some critics have dubbed the new memoirs of traumas and tragedies being churned out by publishers pathographies -packaged tales of woe that inexplicably linger on best-seller lists and naturally inspire successors. Kaufman's own story of a Bronx childhood dominated by his mother, a traumatized Holocaust survivor, departs from this genre in important aspects. He's not recounting misery for misery's sake but leading the reader down the long, winding path he walked before discovering his identity as a Jew and a writer. Jew Boy runs long at more than 400 pages, and details of the author's life as a soldier in Israel, a recently sober poet beginning a career in San Francisco, and later undertaking a literary tour of Germany in the midst of neo-Nazi riots are woefully short compared to lengthy descriptions of childhood and adolescent antics and traumas. Still, this vivid portrayal of how the psychological scars of the Holocaust are passed from one generation to another is also an inspiring portrait of a young man's literary awakening.