Bittersweet Berries : Growing Up Jewish in Minnesota

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0930100832 ISBN 13: 9780930100834

Publisher: Holy Cow! Press, 1998

Noted Jewish author describes her Depression-era life in the Upper Midwest.

From the Back Cover:

Ruth F. Brin's compelling memoir reveals the childhood beginnings of her life as feminist thinker, poet, and well-respected writer of the Jewish faith. Brin draws close and loving portraits of her parents and older brothers, and outlines the history of her paternal grandparents who came to America from Austria-Hungary in the late 1880s to settle in Saint Paul. Early on, Brin relates her growing sense of how her religious faith will be integrated into her life and the ways in which she and her family must confront and survive instances of anti-Semitism. The author's original poems combine with her family's traditional stories to make Bittersweet Berries a unique narrative of one woman's beginnings and growth as an accomplished writer and religious thinker.

From Library Journal:

"I grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota in the 1920s and '30s in a middle-class Jewish family, mostly functioning well in spite of difficulties. Does that make my story typical of middle-class people in those days? Of girls of the time? Of Jews? I don't think so." In this memoir of her childhood and young adulthood, poet and children's author Brin communicates personal history that will help older readers recall the past and teach younger ones about attitudes toward Jews that for the most part no longer exist. Brin describes what she felt growing up in the Jewish minority of a town that was largely of Scandinavian origin. She reminds us of a time when some residential neighborhoods and schools did not allow Jews and makes us a guest at the celebrations of her large, well-established, and well-educated Jewish family as it experiences the good times of the 1920s, the Depression of the 1930s, and the early years of the Holocaust and its effect on American Jews. Recommended for general history as well as Judaica collections in public and academic libraries.AOlga B. Wise, Compaq Computers Inc., Austin, TX
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