Jew Boy by Alan Kaufman

Jew Boy by Alan Kaufman

Jew Boy is Alan Kaufman's riveting memoir of being raised by a Jewish mother who survived the Holocaust. This pioneering masterpiece, the very first memoir of its kind by a member of the Second Generation is Kaufman's coming-of-age account, by turns hilarious and terrifying, written with irreverent humor and poetic introspection.

Throughout the course of his memoir, Kaufman touches on the pain, guilt, and confusion that shape the lives and characters of American-born children of Holocaust survivors. Kaufman struggles to comprehend what it means to be Jewish as he deals with the demons haunting his mother and attempts to escape his wretched home life by devoting himself to high school football. He eventually hitchhikes across the country, coming face-to-face with the phantoms he fled. Taking us from the streets of the Bronx to the highways of America, the kibbutzim and Israeli army to personal rebirth in San Francisco, and finally to a final reckoning in Germany, Jew Boy shines with the universal humanity of a brilliant writer embracing the gift of life. Kaufman's fierce passion will leave no reader untouched.

Little, Brown and Company published Alan Kaufman's novel Matches in the fall of 2005. Matches has been termed an astonishing war novel by David Mamet, and Dave Eggers has said that it contains more passion than twenty other works combined. Kaufman's highly praised memoir, Jew Boy (Fromm/Farrar, Straus and Giroux), has been published in three editions in the United States and the United Kingdom, in hardback and paperback. Kaufman is also the award-winning editor of many anthologies, the most recent of which, The Outlaw Bible of American Literature, was recently featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry and The Outlaw Bible of American Essays are the next two books in Kaufman's Outlaw anthology series. He has taught at the Academy of Art University's graduate and undergraduate schools, as well as writing workshops in San Francisco.

Salon, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Partisan Review, and The San Francisco Examiner have all published his work. Kaufman's work has been frequently anthologized, most recently in WW Norton's Nothing Makes You Free: Essays From Holocaust Survivors Descendants. Kaufman is a PEN American Center member. Kaufman's archives and writings are housed in the University of Delaware's Special Collections Library, and he is included in the Europa Biographical Reference Series.