The snow that fell on Durham last month postponed Adam Sobsey’s reading at the Jewish Book Festival.
This seemed oddly fitting for a writer whose new memoir, A Jewish Appendix, chronicles a series of detours and denied entries—both physical barriers and the more elusive boundaries of Jewish identity.
In A Jewish Appendix, Sobsey recounts a three-month journey through Europe that starts as “a sort of speculative ancestry tour” and evolves into something more profound. The book opens with a coincidence—hours after the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, he wakes up with acute stomach pain and has his appendix removed. Six months later, while visiting Romania, his ancestral homeland, he’s struck by a mysterious, “kaleidoscopic” illness that disappears the day he leaves the country.
The memoir weaves together these physical synchronicities with Sobsey’s internal identity reckoning. Though born to Jewish parents, Sobsey wasn’t raised practicing Judaism. In one poignant scene, he sits in a synagogue while others chant in Hebrew, experiencing it as “that type of dream in which everyone knows what is happening and what to do except you.”
As a Jewish reader, I found that Sobsey’s memoir defies easy categorization, exploring the nuances and contradictions of heritage and belonging in their full complexity.
Sobsey’s elegant, visually rich prose renders scenes with cinematic clarity and transforms small observations into moments of revelation. Early in his journey, staying in an Albanian apartment where all 12 astrological signs were painted on the walls, he reflects that his trip had “commenced under a good sign—under all of them.” Describing his great-grandfather, whom he called “Grape Zaidie” (a childhood mishearing of “Great Zaidie”), Sobsey notes the “dark pigment we all inherited from him”: a “deep vegetal brown that was almost purple, like a tobacco stain stained again with red wine.”
The image resonates beyond family resemblance, evoking Delafia, the Durham wine bar where Sobsey works as a bartender, in a city built on tobacco—threads of inheritance and place woven together in unexpected ways. The book also carries qualities of an adventure story: lines like “I threw a few things in my daypack and set out in total darkness” gave me a feeling of childlike wonder when reading.
Ahead of his rescheduled reading at Jewish for Good on March 21, we met at Delafia for a wide-ranging conversation about illness as metaphor, the weight of Holocaust remembrance, the current Middle East crisis, and the thin lines between belonging and exclusion.
INDY: Your memoir discusses a feeling of being sort of disconnected from Judaism as someone who was born Jewish but wasn’t raised practicing. Another theme, at least as I interpreted it, is that there’s always some meaning that can be harvested from synchronicities. With those two things in mind, I was curious if you had thoughts on the fact that we were supposed to be doing this interview at the Jewish community center, and that your reading there got postponed so instead we’re doing it here at Delafia.
ADAM SOBSEY: My daily life has not changed radically as a result of this trip to the place my great-grandparents came from, or writing this book about my trip. I feel very transformed inside and very different in the way my eyes see the world, and in the way I feel placed in the world as a result of reckoning with being Jewish.
I think I do know what you mean in the sense that so much of the experience that I had while we were overseas and in some of the other little fragments of the episodes of the book had to do with feeling denied access: gates across things, not being allowed entry, exclusionary senses that I had about things. I was also reading a lot of W. G. Sebald while I was writing the book. I published a longish essay about him during the editing period of my manuscript, actually. His work tends to make pretty heavy weather out of synchronicities and coincidences. I may have been borrowing some of that unintentionally. And it is funny that they were opening the door to me at the Jewish community center, and then the snow came along and closed the door.
I’m interested to hear what you think the sickness that you experienced in Romania was.
I don’t think it corresponded to any fixed diagnosis. I think it’s probably at least partly the case that at that point I’d been traveling for two months in some fairly rough places, and just asking a lot of my body to manage the daily demands of running to a bus in the hot weather or walking 10 miles in whatever place.
But what I think I got was—or what I should say is, what I think I was vulnerable to—was a huge susceptibility to what I was about to confront. I didn’t have any armor up physically or psychically. And in place after place across Europe, before we even got to Romania, I was already encountering these other things about Jewish heritage and Jewish identity that I wasn’t even really looking for. So it was kind of like the whispers were already there.
In Albania, there was this weird little Jewish museum there that wasn’t even in the guidebook because it had only just opened. I found out later it closed down about two years later—the fellow who opened it died, and nobody picked it up. So it’s almost like it was this Chronicles of Narnia thing. Like, now it’s not even there. And then the ethnographic museum in Ioannina, Greece, which actually turned out to be basically a Jewish museum in a city I’d never heard of—these little things started, these little darts, I guess, were already in there.
I noticed that your breakdown of the symptoms was kind of paradoxical—”simultaneously congested and leaking, feverish and cold-blooded yet undernourished.” Right before that, in the text, there’s a section where you talk about a feeling you’ve had since you were a child— “a hollow, gnawing feeling, a sense of non-belonging”; a feeling that “there is no home to be sick for”—which also you describe as kind of paradoxical: you say it’s “a feeling as familiar to me as any I’ve ever felt, and it would be a sort of comfort were it not so constitutionally estranging.”
That feeling—is that something that has sorted itself out at all since your trip? Or do you feel like you’re still carrying that?
It’s always lurking. I think writing the book was where I was able to connect it to the Jewish part of my identity. I don’t think it’s entirely or exclusively connected to that, but it helped me to connect it to something.
It gets very emotional for me to talk about this. It’s been kind of the defining existential experience in my life since I was a small child. It doesn’t happen very often, and it happens when I least expect it, and in strange places. For a long time, I connected it to my uncle who committed suicide: that somehow or another, I kind of inherited his loss of moorings.
I think it will always be too elusive for me to connect it right to being Jewish because I think there’s more to it than that. But I think it has something to do with family inheritance that predates my habitation on this planet. Since my family, on both sides, is Jewish, there’s probably something there. That’s a very good question that I don’t quite know the answer to, but I think it’s right at the heart of the book.
There’s some level of metanarrative in the book. At times, you jump in and tell us things about your writing process: for instance, that you could only remember three of the four Hebrew letters that are on a dreidel, and that you had to look up what the fourth letter is.
Things like acknowledging not remembering the dreidel letters had to do mostly with making it clear that I really was raised so unobservant that I couldn’t even remember one of the letters on the dreidel. Which in my mind had something to do with all of the places of omission and absence and disavowal in some places that we ran across in Romania—that there are these things that should be there and that should be in memory and are not.
I didn’t only not feel like I was Jewish until I went to Romania; I think to some degree, I also didn’t come to terms with my identity as a writer until I went there.”
I took a number of things out of the book that were also more explicit about its creation, because it’s not really about that. But I think some of the vestigial traces are about that acknowledgment that I didn’t only not feel like I was Jewish until I went to Romania; I think to some degree, I also didn’t come to terms with my identity as a writer until I went there.
In the memoir, there’s a part where you examine the phrase “We will not forget”—the slogan often used in Holocaust remembrance ceremonies and memorials. You write, “It’s a phrase that seems so clear but when I think about it, it isn’t. Who are ‘we’?” My first thought was like, maybe the Jews.
It’s one of those phrases that’s so vague, you can use it almost any way you want. It can actually be—like so much language around Jews—construed antisemitically, because it separates out an event and a community which is itself always subject to exclusion.
That phrase has just always made my teeth hurt a little bit whenever I heard it. There’s a line in my book about the idea that “we will not forget” can actually be sort of a pretext for more violence.
That reminds me—I recently went down a rabbit hole and found a Jacobin article that opens with “It’s long been remarked that the Holocaust and Israel have replaced God and Halakha as the touchstones of Jewish experience and identity. The Holocaust is our deity, Israel our daily practice.”
It goes on to quote an essay by Phillip Lopate: “In certain ways, the Jewish American sacramentalizing of the Holocaust seems an unconscious borrowing of Christian theology. That one tragic event should be viewed as standing outside, above history, and its uniqueness defended and proclaimed, seems very much like the Passion of Christ.”
In your memoir, you have a quick line about walking past the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan, which “describes itself as ‘A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.’” You write, “Why was a museum of Jewish heritage actually a Holocaust memorial? Was Jewish heritage synonymous with Jewish slaughter?”
In an essay I wrote about A Real Pain I reference an essay by Dara Horn called “Fictional Dead Jews” in which she deplores the disproportionate amount of Jewish literature these days that’s basically uplifting stories about the Holocaust. And that dovetails with what Lopate is saying—like we can find some strange sort of salvation in the destruction of a third of the Jews on earth.
It wasn’t until I read Horn’s essay that I realized how disingenuous that has always struck me. We actually can’t use the Holocaust to prove to ourselves that we can be saved by it in some way. Salvation is not even really a Jewish thing—that is Christian.
So that really helped me understand why I didn’t like Holocaust museums, why the profound need to keep publishing books and movies about it bothered me.
My ancestors left Europe 30 years before the Holocaust. I’m sure I have relatives who died in Romania during World War II, but the people who I know I’m directly descended from were already long settled in America.
In historical time, we are still so close to the end of the Holocaust that it’s still the main thing we’re going to be talking about for a while. Recorded Jewish history goes back more than 3,000 years, and we’re what, 80 years past the end of World War II. We’re still recovering from sickness. It doesn’t surprise me that we have to keep talking about it, or that my book is to some degree an illness memoir. But the Holocaust is not actually part of my story.
I’m aware that we are never very far from the next Jewish problem that can reach a violent place. As soon as you get a group of non-Jews angry about their living conditions, which is how the right-wing has operated for the last decade, and blaming everybody else for those living conditions, it’s only a matter of time before Jews are perceived as part of the problem, or blamed for it outright. And we know where that can lead.
I will say that I got my passport renewed last year, just in case.
I just got mine renewed two weeks ago.
Yeah. I mean, I still had six months on mine. But there’s a lot of countries that won’t let you in if you don’t have some minimum number of months or whatever. So I have 10 years on that thing.
I was reminded of Delafia at certain points while reading your memoir.
You talk about Albanian hospitality and feeling like everywhere you went, “access was granted, doors were opened, sustenance was provided, payment was waived.” I remembered, when I was here last year talking to you about Delafia, you said something about kind of leaving the door open all the time for whoever wanders in, and not being too meticulous about how much you’re pouring and charging. Do you see parallels between the journey that you share in the book and your day-to-day life in hospitality?
Certainly, the instinct to have community around me is a big part of why I do this work, and making people feel welcome and attended to and valued is the main reason that I have been in this business for as long as I have.
Also, frankly, you spend so much time writing, it’s a very solitary act. There’s been a need to have a nonsolitary part of my life that working in this business has always satisfied. That’s probably most of it, but it’s interesting you’re asking me this question.
For a pretty long time, my life in the restaurant business and my life as a writer, I worked pretty hard to keep separate from each other. This is the first place where I have not felt the need to do that at all. That I, in fact, tell people that I have this book coming out. I tell them what it’s about. I tell them I’m a writer, that I also write plays.
In the book, there’s a thing about maybe wanting to write a play about King Saul. I did write a play about King Saul. I’m about to go do some revisions to it, and I wanted to have an event here, because I wanted to be able to tell everybody—mostly my bar regulars, but anybody else who wants to come—that this place has felt like home to me in all of the different parts of my life, that the writing life and the “What kind of wine would you like?” life actually don’t feel separate.
I think that’s definitely connected to having gotten closer to my actual identity as a Jew over several years, since we went to Romania. I have no doubt that that’s part of it.
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