At the Edge: A Jewish Outsider Finds Her Way

Judith A. Goren, PhD, a respected clinical psychologist and poet, looks at her life with depth and honesty. This insightful page-turner collection of personal essays span a time from the early 1930's to the present. She writes with compassion, poignancy and humor of the people and events that have filled her world. Goren grew up in Detroit, a beautiful and vibrant city in the 1930s and 40s. Her parents joyously introduced the city to her, taking her to children's music and theater performances; the Institute of Arts and Main Library; safe, well-kept public parks and pointing out notable architecture. Inviting us into her childhood home, situated at the edge of the "Jewish section," she presents details of how childhood two generations ago differed from now. She describes early incidents which undermined her comfort in being Jewish; depicts aspects of her complex relationship with her mother; and tells how her father, a respected writer and assimilated secular Jew, was nearly destroyed when hidden anti-Semitism cost him his job. She shares the joys and angst of her adolescence; her intellectual awakening as she attended classes at Detroit's Wayne University; and her lack of a sense of belonging in the local Jewish world. We travel with Goren and her young husband when he is an army private stationed in France a decade after the end of World War II; for them, a magical time when Western Europe, nearly devoid of tourism, was their playground. After their return to the United States and starting a family, the young couple meets a brilliant rabbi, Sherwin T. Wine, who is starting a new congregation in a Detroit suburb, while laying the groundwork for what will later become a world-wide movement, Secular Humanistic Judaism. Goren writes of her conflicts about and involvement with this transition; emotional philosophical discussions with Wine; pursuit of spirituality with another mentor, Julia Press; and the unexpected way her lifelong conflicts about being Jewish finally resolve. Readers may find that Goren's themes of childhood and relationships, love and death, spiritual seeking and belonging are mirrors for exploring their own experiences.