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From the Washington Post columnist and James Beard Award-winning author of Poor Man's Feast comes a story of seeking truth, acceptance, and self in a world of contradiction... Treyf: According to Leviticus, unkosher and prohibited, like lobster, shrimp, pork, fish without scales, the mixing of meat and dairy. Also, imperfect, intolerable, offensive, undesirable, unclean, improper, broken, forbidden, illicit. Fans of Augusten Burroughs and Jo Ann Beard will enjoy this kaleidoscopic, universal memoir in which Elissa Altman explores the tradition, religion, family expectations, and the forbidden that were the fixed points in her Queens, New York, childhood. Every part of Altman's youth was laced with contradiction and hope, betrayal and the yearning for acceptance: synagogue on Saturday and Chinese pork ribs on Sunday; bat mitzvahs followed by shrimp-in-lobster-sauce luncheons; her old-country grandparents, whose kindness and love were tied to unspoken rage, and her bell-bottomed neighbors, whose adoring affection hid dark secrets. While the suburban promise of The Brady Bunch blared on television, Altman searched for peace and meaning in a world teeming with faith, violence, sex, and paradox. Spanning from 1940s wartime Brooklyn to 1970s Queens to present-day rural New England, Treyf captures the collision of youthful cravings and grown-up identities. It is a vivid tale of what it means to come to yourself both in spite and in honor to your past.



About the Author

Elissa Altman

"This earthy, gorgeously-written, sensual, powerful book is so compulsively-readable you'll want to read it in one great gulp, but you'll also want to slow down and savor every delicious morsel. Elissa Altman has written a brave and generous memoir, a lucid love letter to her history that--in its bracing clarity and large-heartedness--does the work of great memoir in piercing the reader's separateness, and reminding us that we are not alone. I love this book." --Dani Shapiro, national bestselling author of Devotion"Treyf is a memoir that reads like a novel, a spellbinding portrait of a very specific world that also serves as a universal primer on identity, on loneliness, on the nature of familial bonds, on the ways we make sense of the mess of our lives. Gorgeous, singular, heartbreaking, haunting." --Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year"Treyf is a beautiful, brilliant memoir filled with striking images, unforgettable people, and vivid stories. Elissa Altman has given us the story of an era and a tribe, rooted in 1970s New York City, wrought with such visceral love that the pages shimmer." --Kate Christensen, bestselling author of Blue Plate Special"With TREYF, Elissa Altman has outdone herself. Intricately structured, exquisitely wrought, TREYF exposes the love and longing at the core of transgression. It is a tour de force - nimble, cinematic, restrained. The sacred and the profane are no binary in Altman's world; they are two chambers of a single, beating heart."--Jessica Fechtor, author of Stir"Savvy, warm hearted, and profoundly illuminating...The meaning of the forbidden--in a family, in a self--and the human needs we all struggle with are gloriously explored. This is a transforming book, one of the most satisfying memoirs I've ever read."--Bonnie Friedman, author of Surrendering Oz: A Life in EssaysElissa Altman is the critically-acclaimed, award-winning author of Poor Man's Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking, the James Beard Award-winning blog of the same name, the Washington Post column Feeding My Mother, and a finalist for the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize. She is a contributor to publications ranging from Tin House and Dame Magazine to O: The Oprah Magazine, Saveur, and the New York Times and has spoken live at TEDx on the moral imperative to care for senior citizens.A 2016 resident fellow at Vermont Studio Center, Altman writes full time from her home in Newtown, Connecticut where she lives with her spouse of sixteen years, book designer Susan Turner.



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