In new book, Adam Sobsey retraces his ancestors’ exodus and finds his Jewish soul

(RNS) — Passover is about memory. The central commandment at the traditional seder feast is to remember the exodus, the flight of the ancient Israelites from slavery to freedom.

Adam Sobsey’s new book, “A Jewish Appendix: A Memoir,” isn’t about Passover, but it is about tracing the journey his great-grandparents took in 1910 from a small town in northeastern Romania to Ellis Island and eventually to Pittsburgh.

Sobsey, 54, never talked to his great-grandparents about that exodus. In fact, they refused to talk about it to anyone. His parents drifted away from their Jewish observance, and he was left with a Jewish identity in name only — sort of like his appendix that was surgically removed in 2018.

But the following year, Sobsey and his wife, Heather, took “a sort of speculative ancestry tour” to the place his great-grandparents on his mother’s side came from. The book recounts that three-month journey, which also took Sobsey to Albania, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Greece, a tour he realized later, spanned of the borders of the Ottoman Empire. 

“I wanted to go and see the place where the people I looked like came from,” wrote  Sobsey, who lives in Durham, North Carolina.

As it went on, the trip took on a much more momentous exploration of history, identity and what it means to be Jewish. RNS spoke to Sobsey, a writer and playwright who also moonlights as a bartender, about belonging and exclusion, memory and reinvention — the themes of his book. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

You start the book with a quote from Primo Levi, who said he considered his Jewishness a “negligible but curious fact,” sort of like a discarded appendix. After having taken this journey and written this book, do you still consider your Jewishness that way?

I don’t feel that way anymore. Being Jewish has become a much more central and active organ in my life, to use the metaphor of the appendix. Even though my daily life has not changed radically since that trip, two things really have. One is, I go to Torah study sessions every Saturday at the local synagogue, and over time I’ve come to understand my relationship to being Jewish was going to be activated by reading Torah regularly. That has really changed my whole perception of the aliveness for me of being Jewish. Torah really feels like a living book to me, even though there’s a lot of wrestling with the divine. It’s exactly that wrestling that makes me feel like it’s anything but an appendix, and it’s really active and really powerful and requires all of my body and soul.

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The other thing is, I embarked on that trip feeling like any ordinary American. I came back feeling like an other. That otherness is very much the feeling of seeing what the experience must have been like for my ancestors. It makes me feel more alive, set apart from the much larger country and society that I was born into. I came out of that trip feeling like that curious and negligible fact was not an anomaly. It was in fact the central part of my identity.

Were you angry at your relatives for not speaking about their experiences in old country or not giving you a heritage?

I wasn’t angry at all. I was and still am very respectful of their need to leave that behind. I’m sure there’s a lot of trauma and a lot of suffering involved in their lives there and probably involved in the actual passage from the old country to America. And they’re certainly not alone in not wanting to talk about it. I’ve talked to other people who have said, yeah, my grandparents or great-grandparents never spoke about this.

There’s a natural feeling of sadness or loss that my family history essentially ends at the moment they left Romania in 1910, and that we’ll probably never know much more than we know now. It’s a sympathy actually that I feel for their need to excise that from the record.

You write about meeting this Canadian Jewish family in the Romanian town of Iași, and that you were envious of them because they speak Romanian and are understood by Romanians. Describe what led you to feel so envious.

The envy I felt was that, yes, they were Jews who had to leave the country much later than my family did, but yet they had a legacy behind them. There were literal buildings their relatives had built that were still standing, and they could point to the evidence of their existence there. The mother, who was probably in her 80s, was visiting a theater that she had performed in as a child, and it’s still in use. They can go to the cemetery where relatives they know are buried.

I don’t have any of that over there, so there was this longing to be able to participate in that kind of experience, which was expressed to some degree through their ability to speak Romanian. Language is obviously such a powerful way of feeling connected to a place. Their whole experience was so alien from mine that even though we were both Romanian Jews, I felt this terrible envy of them. I was going to have to create my identity at its roots. It wasn’t there for me to discover.

You write at the end of the book that “Jewish life is not about finding ourselves. Jewish life is about creating ourselves.” Explain what you mean.

That line is adapted from something Bob Dylan told an interviewer and has always made intuitive sense to me. When I was teaching writing, students would tell me (they were) trying to find (their) voice. I would often have to tell them, you don’t find your voice, it’s not lying there waiting for you to find it. It’s actually something you have to invent. I think to tie that into my perception of Jewish experience, this is a community of people on Earth who have constantly been having to reinvent themselves, often because of the threat of persecution or even extinction if they didn’t.

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But there’s a profound amount of adaptability and resilience. Jewish culture since time immemorial is about being willing to throw off centuries of slavery and march off into the wilderness at great risk and simply trusting in their ability to survive, which requires over and over again so much self-reinvention. The act of writing is an act of not only invention but self-reinvention. Every work of writing kind of recreates you in the act of doing it. The epigraph of the book is taken from (the prophet) Samuel, ‘And you shall turn into another man,’ a line spoken to King Saul. That sense of self-reinvention is something I very much feel while I’m working on anything that’s important to me as a writer.

Are you going to a seder for Passover?

Not this year. I run a wine bar, and I actually work Friday nights. But when it’s time to light the candles on the tables, I say the Sabbath blessing over the candles.

You know, this is the thing about saying I wasn’t raised observant. I did go to seders occasionally and knew what Hanukkah was and that sort of thing. It was more a holding an arm’s-length relationship to being Jewish than it was a renunciation of it or avoidance of it, an ambivalence about it that kept me sort of on the margins of it.

What are you working on now?

I had some desire to write a play about King Saul. I have in fact written that play. I’m hopeful of staging that at some point. I’m a passionate defender of King Saul, and I feel like that’s a badly misunderstood character and neglected part of the Bible, and I’m on a minor mission to do something about it.

Sobsey will discuss his book with Rabbi Hannah Bender at 5:30 p.m. Thursday (April 17) at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.