A wise, hardscrabble coming-of-age story about finding oneself in an unlikely locale.
In this memoir, Rossi describes her unusual young adulthood among the Chasidim of Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Before she was known as Chef Rossi, New York’s wildest wedding caterer, the author was Slovah Davida Shana bas Hannah Rachel Ross. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household in 1960s New Jersey, Rossi was meant to marry a nice Jewish boy and give her parents a brood of grandchildren. The author rebelled against those expectations—by selling pot, listening to the Sex Pistols, and kissing non-Jewish boys (and girls)—until her parents decided that desperate measures were required to bring the 16-year-old Rossi back into the fold. Without warning, her father dropped her off at a town house in Brooklyn. “A buzzing noise made me look up to see what at first glance seemed to be a colony of giant bats,” she recalls. “Two blinks later, and I realized it was a half-dozen Chasidic men staring at me, murmuring to one another in what sounded like Yiddish.” Rossi had been admitted to a program for wayward Jewish girls designed to break them of their bad habits. She spent the next two years living according to a strict interpretation of Jewish law that dictated how she should dress, what she should eat, and how she could spend her time. The characters she met there, and the abuse she suffered, would shape her in ways that her parents never could have imagined. Rossi writes with dark humor and a lyrical sense of detail: “If I had been invisible, I would have walked away, past the black coats on Kingston Avenue, past the drug dealers and catcallers on Eastern Parkway, past the ugly brown buildings and half-dead trees. I would have kept walking over the distant bridge I dreamed of crossing, and into the bright, colorful lights of Manhattan.” This memoir reads like a novel, capturing the exciting era of 1980s New York with grit and precision. Though some of these memories are painful, they’re all brilliantly rendered.
A wise, hardscrabble coming-of-age story about finding oneself in an unlikely locale.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781647426972
Page Count: 336
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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