Yiddish Yoga: Ruthie's Adventures in Love, Loss, and the Lotus Position

The poignant and funny tale of a recently widowed New York City Jewish grandmother, who accepts her granddaughter's gift of a year of yoga lessons with surprising results.

A Bubby like Ruthie doesn't necessarily come to yoga with the most open of minds. At first, she is skeptical of yoga and its promise of renewal, healing, and transformation. Ruthie can't resist poking fun at some of the new words and rituals she encounters, translating the exotic language of yoga into the more familiar idiom of her native Yiddish culture.

As Ruthie's journey progresses from week to week, she forges new paths, new postures, and unexpected friendships, slowly overcoming her grief. Yiddish Yoga is a poignant, witty, and human story of love in its many expressions-between grandmother and granddaughter, between an older woman and her younger yoga teacher, between a widow and her husband of fifty years. As Ruthie learns to let go of the past without forgetting, she shows us how to embrace the present with new vigor, strength, and courage, all the while making us laugh.

This small-format gift hardcover features original illustrations, and glossaries of Yiddish and yoga terms.

Lisa Grunberger holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Religions from the University of Chicago Divinity School and teaches writing in the English department at Temple University in Philadelphia. She has taught yoga for many years, and is also a published poet and performer.

A native New Yorker from Long Island who grew up with an Israeli mother and a Viennese father, Lisa was immersed in Yiddishkeit from a young age.

Yiddish Yoga is her first book.