Apartness

Many writers share the state of "apartness"-often standing outside "real life" as an intense observer, sometimes feeling disconnected and alone. With the eyes of a passionate poet, the heart of a devoted daughter, and the skilled mind of a consummate scholar, Kronenfeld expresses these conflicting states while leaning toward the attractiveness of living a committed Jewish life and rejecting the limitations of becoming a devoted member of a religion. The reader appreciates her insightful narratives, while being drawn into the emotional immediacy expressed in the individual poems that complement and illuminate each moving essay. A beautiful and complicated book.

-Merrill Joan Gerber

Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems is an unusual and splendid memoir. Kronenfeld seamlessly integrates prose recollections and reflective poetry as she takes the reader on a highly personal journey of joy, surprise, and sadness. She creates a contemplative exploration of self, a love letter to her family, and a continuous reconsideration of her ethnic and religious heritage. I found myself stopping, chuckling, and nodding my head when Kronenfeld revealed flashes of insight drawn from challenging and intimate moments of her life. A book to be read with pleasure, as well as one to be recalled with joy.

-Carlos E. Cort©s

What a gorgeous exploration of otherness, one that ultimately reminds us how deeply we're connected through the vulnerabilities of the body, the ache and bewilderment of loss. Apartness is seamless in its weave of poetry and essay, the membrane between the genres porous--Judy Kronenfeld's poetry shines through her prose, dappling her sentences with metaphor-she describes her Jewishness as "highly diluted, weak as a fifth cup of tea brewed with the same teabag." "Maybe it is language itself that I am worshiping," Kronenfeld muses, and that devotion courses through each of these pages.

-Gayle Brandeis

Judy Kronenfeld's memoir weaves exposition and poetry to create a nuanced, poignant, and sometimes humorous portrait of life as an outsider in a predominantly Christian culture. Though her Eastern European Jewish background is often in the foreground, Kronenfeld addresses other kinds of "apartness" as well: the American abroad, the aged, the frail. Spanning several decades, she illuminates past inequities and prejudices, though those are not the primary concerns of this work. Despite the beautiful specificity of the stories she tells, this is a book for everyone, written with intelligence, compassion, and an unflinching self-awareness.

-Betsy Mars