You might also like

More about Fortune Teller's Kiss

• Book details
• Synopsis
• Trending among others

You get 47 loyalty points

Book synopsis

There was always the incantation: "Whoever wishes you harm, may harm come to them!" And just in case that didn't work, there were garlic and cloves to repel the Evil Eye - or, better yet, the dried foreskin from a baby boy's circumcision, ground to a fine powder. But whatever precautions Brenda Serotte was subjected to, they were not enough. Shortly before her eighth birthday, in the fall of 1954, she came down with polio - painfully singled out in a world already marked by differences. Her bout with the dreaded disease is at the heart of this poignant and heartbreakingly hilarious memoir of growing up a Sephardic Jew among Ashkenazi neighbors in the Bronx. This was a world of belly dancers and fortune tellers, shelter drills and vast quantities of Mediterranean food; a world of staunchly joined and endlessly contrary aunts and uncles, all drawn here in loving, merciless detail. The Fortune Teller's Kiss is a heartfelt tribute to a disappearing culture and a paean to the author's truly quirky clan, especially her beloved champion, her father. It is also a deft and intimate cultural history of the Bronx fifty years ago and of its middle-class inhabitants, their attitudes toward contagious illness, womanly beauty, poverty, and belonging.

Book details

Book category Books in English Biography & True Stories Biography: general

• Full title: Fortune Teller's Kiss
• Author: Brenda Serotte
• Language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 220
• EAN: 9780803243538
• ISBN: 0803243537
• ID: 04923319
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Weight: 331 g
• Dimensions: 217 × 140 × 15 mm
• Date of publishing: 01. February 2012

Trending among others

---

---

---