The Fortune Teller's Kiss by Brenda Serotte
A tribute to a disappearing culture and a paean to the author's beloved champion, her father. It presents the cultural history of the Bronx and of its middle-class inhabitants, their attitudes toward contagious illness, womanly beauty, poverty, and belonging.
"Poet Serotte turns to prose to recreate her childhood as a Sephardic Jew in post-WWII New York.. Serotte brilliantly recreates the sheer dread the very word polio evoked in those preJonas Salk days. Her description of her familys response to her illness is unflinching... An unquestionably heroic narrative that never sounds preening or self-satisfied. Kirkus Reviews "The Fortunate Tellers Kiss is an enthralling, bittersweet, funny, and wryly intelligent memoir, that gives us a privileged glimpse into a semi-secret world. It delivers pleasure to the reader on every page.--Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body and The Art of the Personal Essay "Well-conceived, passionate, and engaging--the combination of Serottes Sephardic culture and her fight against immobility caused by polio makes this an utterly unique memoir.--Ilan Stavans, editor of The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature "This is a vivid, finely written memoir that reads like good fiction. Brenda Serotte fills her story with the lively details of convergent and interpenetrating worlds: the not-so-distant past, where a beautiful aunt could be abducted into a Turkish harem, and the present, where another aunt still keeps the 400-year-old iron key to the family house in the Cordoba of the Spanish Inquisition. Serotte is a wry and often very funny narrator, capturing the speech and habits of a unique world that probably would have disappeared from human memory were it not for this memoir of a cultural realm where Catholic and Jew and Turkish Moslem once met.--John Balaban, author of Remembering Heavens Face: A Story of Rescue in Wartime Vietnam
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780803243262 |
| ISBN 10 | 080324326X |
| Title | The Fortune Teller's Kiss |
| Author | Brenda Serotte |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | University of Nebraska Press |
| Year published | 2006-03-01 |
| Number of pages | 220 |
| Prizes | Commended for National Jewish Book Award (Sephardic Culture) 2006 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |