BOOK REVIEWS
1. The Mistress's Daughter, by A.M. Homes (Penguin Books paperback, 2007) -- (of especial interest to adoptees who are members of interfaith families, and biological adult children and grandchildren of intermarriage).
Homes is an adoptee, and the book is a memoir of the very sad (though sometimes comic) consequences of being "found" by her unstable biological parents. Homes was in her early 30's, an adoptee raised by a kindly, intellectual, left-wing Jewish family, who had been told that one of her birth parents was Jewish and one was Catholic. Her birth parents had not been married.
On the scaffolding of these "facts," Homes, like many adoptees, fantasized a beautiful birth mother, a successful career woman who lacked only one thing in her life -- Homes. When her birthmother found Homes, she learned that the backstory was both inaccurate and far more awful than she could ever have imagined.
Homes, a brilliantly talented, award-winning writer, brought up in an emotionally level, middle class, reticent Jewish leftist family, was not prepared for her birth parents at all. Both of her birth parents were patrilineal -- each one had a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, and had been raised Catholic, with her birth father identifying as Christian and her birth mother as a Jew. Both seemed hopelessly confused about their ethnicit(ies) and religious beliefs.
It is definitely a book that will interest many adult descendants of intermarriage who are adoptees and also many adult children and grandchildren of intermarriage. It is a sobering reminder that blood may be thicker than water, but it does not guarantee compatibility or family happiness. -- Robin Margolis
2. Jewish, Christian, Chewish, or Eschewish?: Interfaith Marriage Pathways for the New Millennium, by Rabbi Reeve Robert Brenner
Bob Seltzer recommends Reeve Brenner’s “valuable new book on Jewish and interfaith marriage” in the following words: