self-discovery through the rediscovery of ancestry. Ultimately; he defines "American" as a combination of eclecticism and hardship. This book is written uniquely. Chapter by chapter, it toggles between his mother's experiences of growing up in America with his own. His mother details the strict rules of Orthodox Judaism and how they affected her (16). Although his mother is white, she lives in a black world and refuses to acknowledge her whiteness (37). James lives in a home of "orchestrated chaos" (66). He sees his house as a combination three-ring circus and zoo. He describes some of his siblings - his sister Helen, the rebel; Rosetta, the resident queen of the house; his brother Dennis, the civil rights activist and artist with aspirations of becoming a doctor. The whitesat his mother Ruth's school hated Jews, and in public, James becomes ashamed of his white mother (98). 1n 1941, Ruth's Bubeh died. Ruth decided to return to New York (155). Her father tried to get her to stay; she refused. He told her that if she married a black man, she could never come home again. In 1992, while standing in front of a synagogue in Suffolk, James acknowledges his own connection to the synagogue and to Judaism (189).
Abu-Jaber reveals tensions between American and Jordanian cultures in a work called The Language of Baklava: a Memoir. In it, she counters the notion that one Americanizes in some sterile standardized way. For example, her father learns to hail strangers greeting men and women alike with the same greeting: