A finely wrought account about embracing big dreams.
In this debut memoir, a woman describes her quest to become the first female cantor.
Ostfeld was neither conventionally beautiful nor traditionally cool. She was chunky and big-nosed, and her mother cut her hair and made her clothes. Luckily, the author had one place where she felt completely comfortable: her synagogue, where she sang in the temple choir. “When we read together during services, I feel strong and important,” narrates 8-year-old Ostfeld. “The cantor gives me solos. When I sing, I am not fat or nearsighted. I sing like a long sigh, like magic, like the hot glass I saw the man spinning in Colonial Williamsburg.” Called Barbi Prim by her uncle, the author had dreams of being a performer, but when she was cast in plays throughout her teenage years, it was always as the housekeeper rather than the lead. Her home life became increasingly claustrophobic, especially after the family moved from Chicago to Connecticut so her father could take a job at Yale. Ostfeld was instrumental in having her father—who started popping pills and drinking too much—committed to a psychiatric ward for his erratic behavior. After she finished high school, the author enrolled at Hebrew Union College, where she hoped to become the first female cantor in the recorded history of Judaism. Was such a thing even possible, especially in a religion steeped in such ancient traditions? As Ostfeld struggled against professional obstacles in her quest to break the glass ceiling—as well as the hurdles within her own family, both the one that raised her and the one she built across several marriages and children—she was reminded again and again that her place of greatest comfort was within the music and the mystery of her faith.
The memoir is presented as a series of vignettes, most no more than a few paragraphs in length. They will wash over readers, with the author’s awkward moments and epiphanies accumulating like pictures in a photo album: fretting over the lyrics of Christmas carols; writing letters to advice columnist Ann Landers; discovering a hair growing from her chin at Torah camp. Ostfeld writes with vigor and humor, capturing Barbi’s voice at various ages and always in the present tense. Here, she discusses new motherhood after adopting a baby girl from Colombia: “Maternity leave ends, and I am ready. It’s been hard work taking care of Hana. Hard, repetitious, and exhausting. I’ve read too many books about stimulating infants in their early months, so Hana’s tiny head is chock-full of songs, rhymes, numbers, verbose descriptions of nature.” The book reads more like a novel than a memoir, and its shift from early childhood to adulthood is particularly reminiscent of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (one of the works that the bookish young Barbi devours), though Ostfeld continues her narrative deep into middle age. While it’s not always dramatic, the volume offers readers the novelistic sensation of being deeply immersed in another’s consciousness, riding the emotional ups and downs and expanding with the passage of years. By the end, readers will feel they have lived a whole life.
A finely wrought account about embracing big dreams.Pub Date: March 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9980326-1-0
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Erva Press
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.
Remembering “Hershy.”
Three hundred and twenty-eight days. That’s how long Hersh Goldberg-Polin was held in captivity—tortured and starved by his captors in underground tunnels—before he was executed. He was 23 years old. In this unvarnished and heartrending account, Goldberg-Polin’s mother, Rachel, writes of the unending torment that she and her husband, Jon, endured after learning that their son had been kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during the attacks of October 7, 2023. Like so many other young people on that day, Hersh was attending a music festival in Israel—a celebration of love and unity. As Goldberg-Polin writes, her son was “the only American citizen kidnapped alive on October 7th who did not return alive.” In direct, plainspoken language that steers clear of politics, the author, a Jewish educator, recounts “being in a daze of the most indescribably sickening horror and fear, like nothing I had ever felt in my life. I remember my heart racing and feeling like I was in a permanent state of someone scaring me.” In addition to “shovel[ing] out my pain in the form of words,” she shares reminiscences of her son, as well as details that only a parent could notice. “His eyes were cookies,” she says of her “Hershy.” “I couldn’t find the pupils within the dark chocolate-brown irises.…He had a raspy voice, even when he was a baby.” And: “I thought he was hilarious; his sarcasm and humor were similar to mine.” Hersh and his sisters, Leebie and Orly, adapted well to life in Israel after the family moved from Richmond, Virginia. (Hersh was born in the Bay Area.) After being discharged from his service in the Israeli army as a combat medic, he was planning to journey around the world—a longtime dream of his. “So many people have come to love you, Hersh,” Jon Polin writes in the book’s afterword. And with one simple word that has the power to touch any heart, he signs off: “Dada.”
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9798217198009
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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