“The Meshugene Effect” is a 100000-word epistolary hybrid memoir of loss, remembering, and hunches currently seeking representation.
When I was little, my great grandmother used to call me meshugene*. I knew that it meant crazy, or rather a “crazy person”. I was also fully aware of the fact that she used it as a term of endearment and I was proud to be the sole proprietor of the title in our family. Of course, I had no idea at the time that it was a word in Yiddish or that Yiddish was a language spoken by Jews. This unusual nickname of mine was organic to our family vernacular – we all knew what it meant and it never occurred to anyone to question its linguistic or cultural provenance.
When, as a teenager, I developed a completely irrational conviction, a hunch really, that I was Jewish, everyone in the family thought it was absurd.
Still, for the next two decades, I pursued a Jewish life based on nothing but that hunch. So it was, until the secret was finally revealed to me about a shocking deathbed confession my great grandma had made twenty years earlier. It proved my hunch to be a good one all along.
But the biggest revelation came when I discovered that there were other people out there who had inklings about having Jewish ancestry and who were eager to share their stories with me. Together, we began to try to make sense of all of the silences we had inherited.
It was then that I realized that I had been harboring another silence. Having failed to deal with the death of my brother, I had managed to spiral into post-traumatic stress and neatly suppress the fact that I was gay.
But I finally knew what I needed to do. In a somewhat transgressive act, I decided to address the book in its entirety to my dead brother, ruffling the feathers of my family’s unprocessed grief and making some noise against all of the silence.
The Meshugene Effect is an unconventional genre-bending book of absolutely no fiction that should resonate with anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one. It will be particularly relevant for readers interested in the complexities of Jewish identity. It should appeal to anyone engaged in Polish-Jewish history and relations. I imagine it will also be intriguing for folks with an affinity for road trips and those as obsessed as I am with the White Sands Desert in New Mexico.
* The title of the book contains a Yiddish word that translates to the no doubt fraught English word “crazy”. However, “meshugene” is used here in a non-stigmatizing way. It's a direct quote within a contextualized frame of reference.
When I was little, my great grandmother used to call me meshugene*. I knew that it meant crazy, or rather a “crazy person”. I was also fully aware of the fact that she used it as a term of endearment and I was proud to be the sole proprietor of the title in our family. Of course, I had no idea at the time that it was a word in Yiddish or that Yiddish was a language spoken by Jews. This unusual nickname of mine was organic to our family vernacular – we all knew what it meant and it never occurred to anyone to question its linguistic or cultural provenance.
When, as a teenager, I developed a completely irrational conviction, a hunch really, that I was Jewish, everyone in the family thought it was absurd.
Still, for the next two decades, I pursued a Jewish life based on nothing but that hunch. So it was, until the secret was finally revealed to me about a shocking deathbed confession my great grandma had made twenty years earlier. It proved my hunch to be a good one all along.
But the biggest revelation came when I discovered that there were other people out there who had inklings about having Jewish ancestry and who were eager to share their stories with me. Together, we began to try to make sense of all of the silences we had inherited.
It was then that I realized that I had been harboring another silence. Having failed to deal with the death of my brother, I had managed to spiral into post-traumatic stress and neatly suppress the fact that I was gay.
But I finally knew what I needed to do. In a somewhat transgressive act, I decided to address the book in its entirety to my dead brother, ruffling the feathers of my family’s unprocessed grief and making some noise against all of the silence.
The Meshugene Effect is an unconventional genre-bending book of absolutely no fiction that should resonate with anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one. It will be particularly relevant for readers interested in the complexities of Jewish identity. It should appeal to anyone engaged in Polish-Jewish history and relations. I imagine it will also be intriguing for folks with an affinity for road trips and those as obsessed as I am with the White Sands Desert in New Mexico.
* The title of the book contains a Yiddish word that translates to the no doubt fraught English word “crazy”. However, “meshugene” is used here in a non-stigmatizing way. It's a direct quote within a contextualized frame of reference.
