Crooked Lines: A Single Mom’s Jewish Journey
by Jenna Zark
When you part company with the life you’ve been living, how do you start a new one?
While trying to sort out the answer to this question–along with the question of what being Jewish meant to her–Zark began writing. This book was born of the journey. Married to the cantor of a Jewish synagogue, trying to fit in to a life she hadn’t anticipated, Jenna Zark is completely unprepared when her marriage falls apart. Now staring down the prospect of being a single mom, Zark has to decide if and how to work with her former husband, now co-parent, to give her son a Jewish heritage. While the holidays and rituals in these pages are Jewish, the theme is universal and familiar for anyone who has ever experienced life-transforming loss. Crooked Lines is Jenna Zark’s honest and compelling story of navigating divorce, single parenthood, interfaith marriage, and losing parents while holding on to one’s humor and traditions.
5 out of 5 fairies
I loved this memoir – it was a beautiful, and sometime difficult journey through some major life changes. I loved the contrast between religion and faith and the more secular side of life. Furthermore, I didn’t know much about the Jewish faith going in, but I didn’t feel like that was a hindrance when reading this. You can really feel her emotions slipping off the page and surrounding you. Overall, I really enjoyed reading this, and I highly recommend it for fans of emotional, religious, and starting over memoirs.
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Jenna Zark is a columnist, lyricist, and playwright. Her play A Body of Water was published by Dramatists Play Service and produced regionally after its debut at Circle Repertory in
New York. Other plays were produced in the Twin Cities, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and St. Louis. As a columnist at TC Jewfolk, Zark writes about her relationships to Jewish holidays, rituals, and more. Columns have been reprinted in MinnPost, the Star Tribune, the Forward, and elsewhere. Literary essays and poems appeared in FieldReport and Stoneboat; articles have appeared in Woodbury magazine, Minnesota Bride and Midwest Home. Zark is also a member of the songwriting collective Prosody. She is still trying to figure out if it’s harder to write a play, novel or a song. To share your thoughts on that or learn more, please visit www.jennazark.com.
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