Product Description

Early in his memoir, Neal Karlen confesses, "I love Judaism. It's Jews I can't stand."

What he means is that he hates the parochialism, the whole Seinfeld of the Jews he knows from New York to Los Angeles, and he can't stand the thought of being identified as one of them.

Frustrated and embarrassed, Karlen stops looking for the Jewish enclave that fits him, and he simply rejects Judaism. And then one day, he goes too far: he marries a WASP. The marriage is doomed.

Shanda -- the Yiddish word for "shame" -- is the story of Karlen's journey back to his Jewish roots, his faith, and his own self. His guide is an unlikely one: Rabbi Manis Friedman, the renowned Hasidic scholar. With Rabbi Friedman's tutelage and friendship, Karlen rekindles his Jewish spirit and begins to ask the questions that so many modern, assimilated Jews grapple with: How do we bring meaning to our Jewish practice? Where is the line between Jewish and too Jewish? Can you believe in Judaism even if you don't believe in God? As Karlen is led up the mountain to find these answers, Shanda offers a stunning and illuminating view from the top.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2234177 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-23
• Released on: 2005-08-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .60" h x 6.30" w x 8.76" l, .46 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
"[A] stirring journey with a surprising and deeply moving conclusion."

-- Forward

"What makes this personal account of self-dividedness so riveting is the ferocious honesty with which the author exposes his wound and the clarity and humor which seem testimony enough to its healing."

-- Philip Lopate

"Shanda should be sold in a plain brown wrapper -- Neal Karlen's self-examination of his internal identity conflicts is that honest and disturbing."

--Sara Nelson, New York Post

"Shanda reads much like Tuesdays with Morrie but has a wry irreverence and a seething edge. Karlen's memoir is an alternately hilarious and heart-wrenching spiritual adventure."

-- The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

"Poignant and original...Karlen's personal saga shows that while there is no one set way to reconnect with your Jewish heart, the journey is always rich and fulfilling."

-- Stephen Fried, author of The New Rabbi

"If you like scary beginnings, Neal Karlen's memoir is the book for you...The amazing thing here is not how dramatically Karlen turns himself around but how astutely he chronicles the turnaround. Shanda is hilarious, heartbreaking, seething, wary, and joyful -- in a word, a marvel."

-- Stephen J. Dubner, author of Turbulent Souls and coauthor, Freakonomics

About the Author
Neal Karlen writes regularly for The New York Times and is a member of the adjunct faculty of the University of Minnesota journalism school. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Elle, The Forward, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and Olam, among other publications. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In the seconds between shoving my third and fourth White Castle-sized pork sandwich down my throat, I yelled across the lavishly appointed basement toward my host. He and his wife had invited fifty Twin Cities WASPs, and me, to watch Mike Tyson's pay-per-view, main-event boxing match in Las Vegas against heavyweight Frans Botha on their wide-screen television.

I was more interested in the undercard fight for the junior cruiserweight championship belt between the Brooklyn-born Ethiopian Jew Zab Judah and Wilfredo Negron.

"Hey, Jim, call me when the Hebe's fight comes on," I said from the kitchen. I then turned toward the Minnesota crowd waiting with empty buns on paper plates for their own turns at the buffet.

"Zab Judah is the only Yid champ left!" I said loudly to no one in particular but to everybody specifically. "Naturally, they'll never make the Hebe the headline bout, the Nazi bastards!"

Someone shoved a Budweiser into my hand, my fourth of the night. "Well, I usually don't do this," I said, laughing, as I popped the top. "I'm not from a drinking people, you know. It's right there in the Old Testament, Genesis, Chapter Four in the book of Shmeckel: 'And God gave Moses the bong, and it was good. And He said if thou shalt spill the bong water on the carpet, it shalt reek for seven generations...'"

The kitchen exploded. "I missed that one in Sunday school," a blond woman said, laughing the hardest.

As usual, I was enticed by her Crest smile, the way she laughed at my jokes like they, or I, were deeper than I was letting on. The delicate little gold cross on a chain hung over her turtleneck, indicating she was as forbidden to me as I was to her.

This was my kind of woman. When asked why I went out only with non-Jewish women, I had a stock reply that further outraged or cracked up most any audience I was able to gather.

"Jewish women hate me," I said that night, as I often did. "I think I remind them of their annoying Uncle Morty, the schmuck at the Seder table with the stupid hundred-year-old Borscht Belt jokes. They want lawyers from Plymouth, not writers living in the middle of the city. As Abbie Hoffman said, 'You go for the gelt or you go for broke.' They don't want to go for broke."

In my more self-righteous moments I likened myself to an Abbie Hoffman-troublemaking Jew. I hadn't gone what I considered the easy route of suburban-bred Twin Cities Jew. I wasn't a lawyer or orthodontist trained at the University of Minnesota. I hadn't been a member of Sigma Alpha Mu, the Jewish fraternity known as the Sammies. My generation of Minneapolis Jews had almost all gone for the gelt, eventually ending up in a house with 2.3 kids in Twin Cities' suburban gilded ghetto.

I viewed them from afar as judgmental ignorants. Of course, I was the one judging, projecting my own despair and need to belong back at them. I saw how they took care of each other when someone died: the shiva, the food, the communal tears. I wondered narcissistically who would mourn me, thinking of an old Yiddish joke about a Jew so bad no one could find a eulogist. Finally, a rabbi volunteered, offering up the words: "His uncle was worse." Though I pretended not to care, I did.

Outwardly, at least, I wanted to emulate my heroic Jewish outlaws; I wanted to join the spirit of what people like the ones mystery writer Kinky Friedman and founder of a country and western band called the Texas Jewboys enumerated.

From Moses, Friedman said in the Forward, "a long line of Jewish troublemakers followed -- Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx, Groucho Marx, Lenny Bruce, Abbie Hoffman -- who were spiritual beacons in a [gentile] world. "These among other lantzman," Friedman continued, also served as lighthouses for frightened Jews who for millennia "shun trouble, avoid at all cost confrontations...we who look in our mirrors [and] are mildly surprised that we're still here."

Now, that was me. I felt like an obsolete pinball machine whose spare parts hadn't been made. I was also a self-deluded fool. Standing here, outraging my audience, I was no Jewish outlaw like Abbie, throwing bills to the floor of the Stock Exchange. At best I was a Vegas lounge act.

Unconsciously, I threw in a joke to the crowd in the kitchen, a Henny Youngman one-liner:

"Why do Jewish husbands always die before Jewish wives?" I asked.

"Because they want to."

The room erupted and I reached for another beer.

I was shticking like Milton Berle on crystal meth, using a speed rap I'd developed at college parties to get a group of gentile women to encircle me. If they were laughing at my rap here, I figured, they couldn't ogle the sensitive guitar player singing Grateful Dead tunes in the living room. Shagetz (non-Jewish) musicians always had it easier than Jewish men in getting the girls. I'd joke in the kitchen, where everybody had to pass by me on the way to beer and food. In Minneapolis -- at concerts, ball games, dinner parties, the theater during intermission, walking along the street, or standing in a virtual stranger's kitchen eating trayf (nonkosher food) -- I delighted in outraging the gentiles. I was engaged in shtetl shpritzing, Jewish jazz.

Did my non-Jewish friends perchance want to see my horns, I'd ask, or the yellow stripe running down my back? And gee, I'd throw in, sorry about killing your Lord and all that, it was a party, things got out of hand, he didn't chip in for the Last Supper's tip. Before launching into my full-blown anti-Jewish joke parade, I half insulted them by slightly altering some of Henny Youngman's Polish jokes.

"Did you hear about the guy who was half Swedish and half Jewish?

"He's the janitor of a building, but he owns it."

"Shpritzing?" the blonde at the party asked.

"Surrounded by other Jewish wise guys, usually at a diner or deli, you just shoot out jokes as fast as you can and everybody tries to top you," I said, staring at her. "When they were young, Lenny Bruce (né Leonard Schneider), Rodney Dangerfield (né Jacob Cohen), Jerry Lewis (né Joseph Levitch), and whatever Jewish comic was in town shoehorned themselves into a booth in a Brooklyn diner and shpritzed faster than Chuck Yeager flew. Shpritzing was the Jewish right stuff. Henny Youngman claimed that Jerry Lewis even shtupped a woman in the candy store's phone booth without missing the beat of his jokes. Now Lenny, there was a Jew considered a shanda fur di goyim."

Nobody asked what shtupping was, but the blond woman said, "I heard of Lenny Bruce, he was in that R.E.M. song about the end of the world. What is a...shalen goy...?"

"Let's see," I said, thinking of an example. "Woody Allen getting arrested for molesting or at least marrying his child is a shanda fur di goyim."

"I don't understand," she of the golden, dangling crucifix said.

"Let's put it this way," I said. "When Abbie Hoffman was screaming at the inept Judge Julius Hoffman at his infamous Chicago Seven conspiracy trial..."

"I studied that in college," she said. "A lot of people think that was the most important trial of the century."

I liked this shiksa. She knew Lenny Bruce and Abbie Hoffman, albeit through Michael Stipe songs and college history texts. "Yeah," I said, "well, Abbie screamed in court to the judge, 'You're a disgrace to the Jews in front of America! You're a shanda fur di goyim!' A shanda fur di goyim is the worst thing one Jew can say to a Jew -- it means you're such a rat bastard that you make all Jews look bad in front of the goyim." They all laughed. Christ, the gentiles loved being called goyim to their faces by a crazy Jew.

How could I make such a spectacle of myself and talk such trash, be such an unmitigated ass, after all that had happened, I wondered briefly, a suddenly conscious current of self-loathing making me want to crawl out of my skin. But I quickly repressed the noxious feeling that mocked who I had become during the last two decades -- a buffoon who despised who he was and where he'd come from.

Even when I was still a kosher-keeping and religious youth, studying Hebrew and ancient Aramaic harder than anyone I knew, I'd tried to get away from my ancestry and be just an American kid, as in the sit-com fantasies of gentile life, ironically almost always written by first-generation Jews, peopled by kids who couldn't fall asleep on Christmas night.

As split inside as Cain and Abel, I'd had plans to be a rabbi, yet I'd always wanted to fit in, to assimilate. I didn't want to be just a "normal" kid but rather a brave outlaw. So I was the bookie for my tenth-grade class, taking bets in the lunchroom on Friday for that Sunday's game before heading home to prepare for Shabbos.

I'd totaled four cars, been arrested for big-ticket shoplifting at fourteen, had my license suspended at seventeen by altering it to make it look, I thought, as if I were old enough to drink. The judge gave me only the mandatory one-month suspension when I told him I needed to get to the synagogue every Saturday to teach religion, which was actually true. During those four weeks, I simply hitchhiked down Minneapolis's busiest thoroughfare in my suit, John Dillinger with a tallis bag instead of a tommy gun in hand.

At school I wrestled and played freshman hockey, punching and flipping gentiles on their backs to middlin' success, but at least proving I was no weakling Jew. At forty, I hadn't known or cared for decades where my Phi Beta Kappa key was, but my framed certificate for being the 104-pound wrestling champion of my seventh-grade class followed me everywhere I lived.

Only later did I realize that my need to "prove" myself was about asserting my masculinity. I felt that as a Jew my manhood was always in question. Just as most Jewish women are revolted by the stereotype of the JAP, I was ...