JEWISH GIRLS GONE WILD

A remembrance of growing up Jewish in Arizona in the 1970s.

Pressman’s previous memoir, Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors, and Skokie (2011), was about growing up as one of seven daughters of Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois. This new work delves into the culture shock her family experienced in 1973, when they moved from Skokie, which had a large Jewish community, to Scottsdale, Arizona, which did not. As the title implies, it’s also about the author’s ’70s era “wild child” teenage years, which included experimentation with sex, drugs, and shoplifting before she “straightened up” and headed to college. The most compelling parts of this remembrance are Pressman’s memories—good and bad—of her “philandering, yelling, distant, stingy” father, an entrepreneur who was “completely uninvolved in the life of the family.” Over the course of this book, Pressman also complicates a conventional narrative of American Jewish postwar upward mobility, noting how Holocaust survivors’ ideas of success were more modest than those of other Americans’ and how her parents’ scars never fully healed even as they forged ahead. The book is somewhat slow-paced at first, but it picks up speed after a dramatic, unexpected family tragedy; the author’s account of this event includes the painful admission that she was out shoplifting at the local mall when it occurred, waiting for a ride home that didn’t come. From there, she effectively describes her mother’s transformation from homemaker to diet-beverage salesperson to successful real estate agent; she also notes that her mom stayed with a bad boyfriend: “Apparently, with the pressure on, she must pick someone,” Pressman observes. “It’s the seventies and no one’s allowed to be happy alone.” The book’s climax is a transformative visit back to Skokie, which delves into the meaning of home.

A highly readable, sometimes-insightful coming-of-age memoir.