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Product Description
With a brilliant flair for narrative and language, Alhadeff spins a tale--both wildly humorous and deeply affecting--of her beguilingly uncommon family. 272 pp. 12,500 print.
Amazon.com Review
Alhadeff's prose is so wittily precise and casually elegant it's hard to believe she didn't learn English until she was 10--in Tokyo, of all places. Born in Egypt in 1951, educated in Italy, Japan, England, and America, the author comes from a family of cosmopolitan, multilingual Sephardic Jews who "considered ourselves primarily free to be anything we wished"--including Catholic. (Her parents, whose difficult marriage is unsentimentally portrayed, converted.) Lovingly acerbic tales about various wildly individualist relatives combine with personal history in a colorful narrative that trenchantly declares independence from the constraints of "ready-made identity."
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