Tevye's Grandchildren - Paperback

by Eleanor Mallet (Author)

In Tevye's Grandchildren: Rediscovering a Jewish Identity, Eleanor Mallet describes the unusual journey she took to understand her Jewish past. Like many American Jews, she was secular, assimilated and part of the successful mainstream. When her sons came of age, they reached for a richer, more open way of being Jewish. Their interest sent her on an exploration in which she plunged into the dynamic and relatively recent field of Jewish history, studied Hebrew and traveled to Israel and Germany. Mallet's book provides a tour, from a personal vantage, of the historical forces that are in play for Jews today. In it she connects the spare outline of her Jewish past with its fleshy, fractured history. Her Judaism had a passionate center, which found expression in part in Israel. Yet it was also filled with the dissonance that flowed from American assimilation and the Holocaust's aftermath. These are the forces that have preoccupied the Jewish community for quite some time. Understanding them has taken on a new urgency with the recent and not always welcome prominence Jewishness and Israel have on today's world stage.

Author Biography

Eleanor Mallet has been a journalist for over 20 years. She received The Ohio Excellence in Journalism Award in 1997. She is a former columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland. Ohio and a graduate of Oberlin College. She lives with her husband David Bergholz in Shaker Heights. Ohio.