ti t ist * STAR DELI • IS PROUD TO BE ONE OF AMERICA'S BEST CARRY-OUT ONLY DELIS! YOU'LL ENJOY OUR GREAT HOMEMADE GOODNESS! OUR POTATO SALAD CANT BE BEAT! REGULAR OR FAT-FREE EVERYBODY KNOWS WE HAVE THE FINEST HOMEMADE TUNA IN TOWN! REGULAR OR FAT-FREE! On The Bookshelf WE CUT OUR LOX BY HAND! Author Stephen Dubner grew up in a devout Catholic household but found his Jewish roots. OUR TRAYS CAN'T BE BEAT FOR QUALITY & PRICE! Meat Tray $5.75 per person $ Dairy Tray $10.50 per person • Expires 12-31-98 • One Per Customer DELIVERY AVAILABLE SANDEE BRAWARSKY OFF Special to The Jewish News • Not Good Holidays • 10 Person Minimum STAR DELI 24555 W. 12 MILE, Just West of Telegraph, Southfield 352-7377 I. DISTINGUISHED RESTAURANTS OF NORTH AMERICA 1997 AWARD OF EXCELLENCE Private Garden Room or Fireside Setting for parties, receptions wedding rehearsals, showers, bar mitzvahs, business meetings, audio, visual capabilities 30715 W. TEN MILE RD. (Just East of Orchard Lake Rd.) 248.474.3033 11/13 1998 110 Detroit Jewish News .00 a hen Frances Greenglass and Sol Dubner con- verted from Judaism to Catholicism during • World War II, it was as though a gate banged shut; neither looked back. Embracing Catholicism zealously, they broke with their families as well as their reli- gion; Dubner's father sat shiva. The pair met and married after each had convert- ed independent- ly; they became Veronica and Paul Dubner. Decades later, their son Stephen, the youngest of their eight children, unlocked the gate, opening to a renewed Jewish future. While it's true that you need a great story to write a great memoir, more importantly, you need to be able to tell it well. Dubner has remarkable material in his family's dramas and mysteries, but it's his fine writing and novelistic style that makes Turbulent Souls: A Catholic Son's Return to His Jewish Family (Morrow; $24) stand out among many recent memoirs. With respect toward both religions, he recounts his parents' stories and his own, finding an authentic and natural voice to talk about Heaven and souls and faith as well as things mundane. "It became a book I had to write," Dubner explains, and that urgency is apparent on the page. "Family is the best subject to write about," Dubner, 35, a writer and editor at the New York Times Magazine, says. "It's rich in every way a writer wants; it's a container that holds every curiosity." The memoir opens with Dubner's family piling into the car to go to church, as they would every Sunday, from their farmhouse in upstate New York. After mass, they'd come home to a big breakfast, having fasted until receiving communion. The author's father would skip the waffles and fix himself some matzah topped with gefilte fish. Although the children knew some- thing about the fact that their parents had been Jewish, it meant nothing. "For all I knew about Jews, my parents might well have been Baptists, or Elks, or carnival workers," he writes. He didn't know of his extended Jew- ish family, or that Ethel Rosen- berg, executed in 1953, was his mother's first cousin, or even the names of his grandparents. Paul and Veronica, then Sol and Florence, were each born to parents who had immigrated from Eastern Europe around the Stephen Dubner speaks at the Jewish Book Fair on Sunday. turn of the century; their childhoods in Brooklyn sound like the stories of many first-generation Americans, grow- ing up in a world altogether different from the one their parents left behind. Sol, who had a difficult relationship with his religious father, found Catholicism while serving in the Army, while Florence was influenced by a ballet teacher, and found comfort and meaning in Catholic teachings. •■ I