THE PUNK-ROCK QUEEN OF THE JEWS

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.