Book 24: Holy Unexpected

Holy Unexpected: My New Life As A Jew by Robin Chotzinoff is her story of becoming religious. She was raised by atheists but was ethnically Jewish, and at age 40 she decided to become religiously Jewish.

Chotzinoff excels at meeting people and finding out their opinions on all sorts of things (she also wrote People With Dirty Hands about gardeners). She listened to different opinions about keeping a kosher kitchen, following the sex rules, and observing the Sabbath fully (should you drive? should you clean? should you flick the light switch?). Her older daughter quickly became much more Orthodox than Chotzinoff herself, who prefered to pick and choose what worked for her.

She also talks a lot about her relationship with her father. He was initially very angry and disappointed in her for becoming religious, but over the years he came to enjoy eating traditional dinners with her family, even while mocking some aspects of them. His health declined, mostly due to his lifetime of unhealthy choices, but he lingered on the verge of death for years. This trying relationship and saddening/maddening situation was the best part of the book for me, though I enjoyed reading about how she decided which aspects of Judaism to focus on, which to ignore, and which to save for later consideration.