As soon as the sun sets off the Pacific coast this evening, bringing Yom Kippur to a close, Ruth Andrew Ellenson (left) will pick up her reading tour for The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt right where it left off, appearing at the Berkeley Hillel with Ayelet Waldman. Ellenson has been racking up the frequent flyer miles to support this anthology of slices of modern Jewish life from twenty-eight women writers, bouncing back and forth between New York, San Francisco, and her Los Angeles home. Just last week, she rounded up eleven of her contributors for three Manhattan readings in four nights, and I caught up with her at the final event Saturday night in the second-floor performance space at Mo Pitkin’s, co-sponsored by Heeb magazine.
Kera Bolonik, whose essay “You Sit in the Dark, I’m Coming Out of the Closet” was excerpted in the Heeb “sex issue” scattered around the room, was a last-minute no-show, jammed up against a deadline, so Laurie Gwen Shapiro stepped up with a story about fighting with her husband over whether she’d allow a Christmas tree in their living room. It set the tone for the evening: funny without pushing too hard, and recognizing the centrality of her Jewish identity without feeling the need for defensiveness or excessive explanation. Cynthia Kaplan spoke movingly of caring for a grandmother with Alzheimer’s, while documentary filmmaker Pearl Gluck’s began “Shtreimel Envy” by describing her coveting of “those voluptuous fur hats that Hasidic men earn just for getting married, then recounted her first adolescent discoveries of the world outside her Hasidic Brooklyn community, and the rift it created within her family (“Brandeis may as well have been Christ College to my dad”). Finally, Molly Jong-Fast gave a quick tour of her extensive forays into psychotherapy—at just 26, she’s seen enough shrinks to field a baseball team and still have a relief pitcher ready in the bullpen, almost all of whom were convinced that being born to the woman who wrote Fear of Flying made her sexually repressed. At the halfway mark, and again at the show’s close, Basya Schechter of Pharaoh’s Daughter played acoustic versions of her songs, closing the set with, she joked to the audience, “a song in Hebrew about how there’s no hope in the world.” (At least, I’m pretty sure she was joking…)
If you missed these shows, don’t worry: Ellenson will be returning to New York for a large-scale reading (eight guests!) on November 10th at Makor.