In Poetic Memoir “A Jewish Appendix,” Adam Sobsey Encounters Signs and Wonders

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Good morning, readers.

When snow postponed Adam Sobsey’s reading at the Jewish Book Festival last month, it felt strangely appropriate for a writer whose new memoir, “A Jewish Appendix,” chronicles a series of detours and denied entries.

A Durham native, Sobsey opens his memoir with an uncanny coincidence: hours after the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting, he woke up with stomach pain that led to an emergency appendectomy. Six months later, while exploring his ancestral homeland in Romania, a mysterious illness struck—one that vanished the moment he left the country.

What started as “a sort of speculative ancestry tour” evolved into a profound reckoning with Jewish identity for Sobsey who, though born to Jewish parents, wasn’t raised practicing Judaism. In one scene, he sits in a synagogue while others chant in Hebrew, experiencing it as “that type of dream in which everyone knows what is happening and what to do except you.”

When we met at Delafia, the Durham wine bar where Sobsey works, last month, our conversation ranged from illness as metaphor to Holocaust remembrance to the current Middle East crisis. His rescheduled reading takes place at Jewish for Good on March 21. Have a good Tuesday.

 —Lena

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