Unraveling Solitude: Judy Kronenfeld’s Mesmerizing Journey Through Apartness
Often, Kronenfeld’s family takes center view: a father’s near escape from Nazi Germany, a mother’s emphasis on decorum and the division between home and “street” life, the author’s childhood “in a lower-class immigrant neighborhood in the Bronx,” next to an Orthodox synagogue attended only once. Kronenfeld also wrestles with the parental, societal, and religious decisions that fill her marriage, while also modeling choice for her children.
At times, though, choice seems an illusion, complicating the question of identity for one who describes her Jewishness as “weak as a fifth cup of tea brewed with the same tea bag.” A scholar of 17th century Metaphysical Poetry, dripping with Christianity; a lover of the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins; and the author of King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance, Kronenfeld examines what it’s like to be part of and separate from various faith, academic, and cultural communities, as well as those separated by language and comprehension.
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