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In her new memoir, U-M grad puts the "hip" in "Hypocrite."

JULIE WIENER

Special to the Jewish News

•

Ann Arbor
usan Jane Gilman may well go down in the
annals of Jewish journalism as the only reporter
to eat shellfish while interviewing a rabbi. Not
just any rabbi, mind you, but one of Israel's most
prominent Orthodox rabbis.
The fateful lunch, when Gilman was a cub reporter
at the New York Jewish Week, was not a provocation but
a genuine blunder.
"I really didn't know lobster wasn't kosher," said
Gilman, 40, in a phone interview with the Jewish
News. "The kosher deli near my high school served
tuna, so I figured all fish was OK."
The faux pas is one of numerous amusing mishaps
and adventures, many of them of Jewish interest, in
Gilman's laugh-out-loud funny memoir Hypocrite in a
Pouffi White Dress: Tales of Growing Up Groovy and
Clueless (Warner Books; $12.95).
Gilman — who is also the author of Kiss My Tiara:
How to Rule the World as A Smartmouth Goddess —
quirkily chronicles the highlights of her life, beginning
with a 1960s and 1970s assimilated Jewish Manhattan
childhood spent yearning to be Puerto Rican and con-
cluding with two overwhelming years as an ex-pat in
Switzerland. Along the way, Gilman lusts after Mick
Jagger, reluctantly accompanies a group of teens on the
March of the Living tour of German concentration .
camps in Poland, gets mistaken for a lesbian, has a
short-lived career on Capitol Hill, comes to terms with
her parents' divorce and plans a wedding at which a
rabbi and Wiccan priestess co-officiate.
Gilman emerges as an ambitious, unapologetic femi-
nist who is smart and appealing, albeit frequently
naive, arrogant, ignorant and misguided. In a modern
publishing landscape in which virtually every mem-
oirist seems to be in recovery from some sort of abuse,
addiction, severe family dysfunction or mental illness,
Hypocrite is refreshingly healthy and devoid of self-pity.
Sure, Gilman is neurotic, but she's also plucky and
doesn't take herself too seriously.
Like all good memoirs, Hypocrite is not only about
its author but vividly captures the people and places
around her: the earnest "Free To Be You and Me" liber-
alism of the early 1970s, the blend of teen banalities
and Holocaust atrocities on the March of the Living, as
well as timeless things like the cruelty and narcissism of
children, the horny and self-righteous obsessions of

S

adolescence and the utter disorientation that
comes with living in a foreign country.
Gilman vividly profiles her flawed but likeable
parents; her shleppy, but wise, Orthodox mentor
at the Jewish Week, her earthy congresswoman
boss; and countless others. Even Mick Jagger
makes a guest appearance.

Susan Jane Gilman: "I
think every New Yorker
should put in some time
in the Midwest."

Michigan Connection

One aspect of Gilman's life that, sadly for Michigan
readers, doesn't get much ink in the book is her time in
the Great Lakes State.
From 1991 to 1995, years she remembers as "one of
the happiest times in my life," Gilman lived in Ann
Arbor, where she earned a master of fine arts degree in
creative writing from the University of Michigan, then
taught at both U-M and Eastern Michigan University
and wrote for various local newspapers.
"I think every New Yorker should put in some time
in the Midwest," Gilman told the Jewish News. "It
cooled me out, made me less neurotic and was better
for my writing."
Among her favorite things about Michigan were
Zingerman's Deli, Greektown and "the fact that you
could go across a bridge and be in another country."
Much of Gilman's book addresses her complete igno-
rance about her Jewish heritage, something she was
forced to confront during her 3-year stint at the Jewish
Week, a job she reluctantly took shortly after graduating
from Brown University only because nothing more
glamorous was available.
At the time, she writes, she "knew as much about
Judaism as I knew about aluminum siding."
Earlier in the memoir, Gilman reveals that she did
not learn she was Jewish until 6th grade, when a class-
mate at the Presbyterian school she attended told her
she couldn't audition for the role of the Virgin Mary in
the school Christmas pageant.
"I was Jewish? And Jews didn't celebrate Christmas?"
she writes. "This was all news to me. In between
Passover seders — and attending an occasional "folk
mass" to sing Peter, Paul & Mary songs with a hippie
priest with a banjo and listening to my mother quote
the guru Ram Dass — why, we'd always celebrated
Christmas!"
The Jewish Week served as a "belated Hebrew
school," Gilman told the Jewish News, noting that "I
came in with no work ethic and in a miniskirt, yet they
tolerated me. As I committed blasphemy right and left,
they tried to educate me."

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"They treated me like the youngest child at the
Passover table," she said appreciatively.
One pivotal moment, which Gilman chronicles in
her book, was covering the March of the Living. While
visiting the German death camps in Poland, it sudden-
ly sunk in that she, too, would have been killed had
she been in Europe during the Holocaust.
"Until that moment, staring directly into the genoci-
dal maw of a body-sized pizza oven, I'd somehow
assumed that the Holocaust had been meant for other
people — for real Jews, Jews who actually cared about
their religion. ...Yet as if it could speak, as if a demonic
voice had been summoned from the inferno of its past,
the oven gaped before me and its message was only too
obvious: Oh, Sister. Don't kid yourself This one's for
you."

Jewish Bond

Today, Gilman, who resides with her husband in
Washington, D.C., says she is not particularly reli-
gious but feels a strong connection to Jewish culture
— and always donates to Jewish relief organizations
when there is a disaster in the world.
"I feel the way I look at the world and my com-
mitment to who I am as an adult is very Jewish, driv-
en by that heritage," she said, adding that "when I
have children, I think these issues will come more to
the forefront in my life."
"I don't want my children to learn they're Jewish
because some Christian kids at school are teasing
them. I don't want them to be oblivious to where
they come from," she said.
Chances are, their mom will teach them at least
one thing about Judaism: Lobster is definitely not
kosher. ❑

Susan Jane Gilman reads from and signs copies of
Hypocrite in a Poujjj, White Dress 7 p.m. Monday,
Feb. 7, at Shaman Drum Bookstore, 311-315 S.
State St., in Ann Arbor. (734) 662-7407.

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