A Jewish Appendix: a memoir

Known for his smart, lively baseball writing, his acclaimed biography of the rock music legend Chrissie Hynde, and his erudite literary essays, Adam Sobsey returns with a powerful, passionate, deeply personal memoir of reckoning with his Jewish identity.

In October of 2018, the day after a gunman walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed eleven Jews, Adam Sobsey woke up with acute stomach pain. The next morning, he was in surgery to remove his appendix. A nonpracticing Jew, he made no connection between these two events. But six months later, when he arrives in Romania to visit the homeland of his great-grandparents, who had immigrated a century earlier - to Pittsburgh, where they helped found a synagogue-he is besieged by a mysterious illness that responds to no treatment and just as mysteriously vanishes the day he leaves the country, three weeks later.

Through the upheaval in his body and his encounters with the ravaged ruins of Jewish life in Romania-and flooded by memories of his own past-Sobsey is forced to confront his Jewish identity and roots. Once at home again, he bonds to his heritage by immersing himself in the power of words: a forgotten corner of the Hebrew Bible, the legendary travel writing of Patrick Leigh Fermor, and Jewish writers and artists ranging from the seminal Romanian existentialist poet Benjamin Fondane, who perished at Auschwitz, to Bob Dylan himself. Finally, he goes to Pittsburgh, in search of last clues about his family origins.