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Alan Kaufman's new
memoir is a coming-of-age account
written with the irreverent humor
and poetic introspection reminiscent of the Beats.

JOSHUA BRANDT

Jewish Bulletin of Northern California

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SINCE 1920
THE TRADIi1ON CONTINUES

here is a question that rene-
gade poet and former Israeli
soldier Alan Kaufman does
not understand.
The question vexes him, causing
him to unfurl his lanky 6-foot-2-inch
frame. He slowly tucks his palms
under his arms, further exaggerating
the contours of his biceps.
His thick, black boots land with a
soft thud on the hardwood floors, and
he adjusts his glasses, brushing away
an unruly mop of raven hair.
Kaufman mulls over the question
with an overt physicality that fails to
contain the intellect roiling beneath
— calling to mind the sweaty, sexed-
up scientist in Jurassic Park portrayed
by Jeff Goldblum — who happens to
be, just like Kaufman, unmistakably, a
Jew.
The question is this: Why has the
just-released Jew Boy (Fromm
International: $27) been called every-
thing from "shocking" to "inappropri-
ate" by various members of the Jewish
community?
Leaders of San Francisco's
Congregation Emanu-El, for example,
emphatically declined an offer to hear
Kaufman read from the book.
"Why didn't they want to hear
about my book?" the San Francisco-
based author said. "After all, I'm a Jew,
right?"
His soft Bronx accent trails off, leav-
ing the unanswered question lingering
in his living room.
Kaufman, who was the publisher of
Davka magazine and is the editor of
the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, is
not afraid of courting controversy or

of jolting readers out of their compla-
cency. His latest book, he says, fills a
void in Holocaust literature, telling
the story of American children whose
parents were survivors.
"In a very real way," Kaufman con-
tinued, "it's a combination of
Huckleberry Finn meeting
Auschwitz."
But what constitutes the unvar-
nished truth for Kaufman may require
a little sugar coating for others.
The book's title, set off in the stark
red and black colors of Nazi emblems,
depicts the author's face in the letter
"0" as if it were the center of a bull's-
eye.
The biographical work introduces
the reader to Kaufman's harrowing
home life, Where he is beaten by his
Holocaust-survivor mother with a
rolling pin and largely ignored by his
father.
Kaufman's mother, a Jewish French
immigrant, is an open wound of rage
and despair, and rails against her
"ungrateful" son and "putz" husband.
The Holocaust hangs over the
Kaufman family's Bronx tenement like
a specter, bubbling up in grotesque,
violent and occasionally sexualized
images.
The 10-year-old Kaufman ponders
"the infliction of unbearable suffering
on Jews in history after history —
being boiled alive, nailed to the stake,
flayed, skinned, sliced and fed to wild
animals."
Although his mother was spared this
fate, Kaufman writes that she was an
exception, and that the inevitability of
death causes him to wish not to be
Jewish "more than anything in the
world."
The anguish of his mother's