The Punk-Rock Queen of the Jews: A Memoir

by Rossi

Overview

This is Rossi’s wild, queer coming-of-age story. Rossi was taught only to aspire to marry a nice Jewish boy and to be a good kosher Jewish girl. At sixteen she flowers into a rebellious punk-rock rule-breaker who runs away to seek adventure. Her freedom is cut short when her parents kidnap her and dump her with a Chasidic rabbi—a “cult buster” known for “reforming” wayward Jewish girls—in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Rossi spends the next couple of years in a repressive, misogynistic culture straight out of the nineteenth century, forced to trade in her pink hair and Sex Pistols T-shirt for maxi skirts and long-sleeved blouses and endure not only bone-crunching boredom but also outright abuse and violence.

The Punk-Rock Queen of the Jews is filled with wonderfully rich characters, hilarious dialogue, and keen portraits of the secretive hothouse Orthodox world and the struggling New York City of the 1980s: dirty, on the edge, but fully vital and embracing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647426972
Publisher:	She Writes Press
Publication date:	04/23/2024
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	409,991
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Rossi has been published in outlets including The Daily News, The New York Post, Time Out New York, and Mcsweeney’s, to name a few. She has been the food writer of the “Eat Me” column for Bust magazine since 1998, hosts her own hit radio show on WOMR and WFMR in Cape Cod called Bite This, now in its nineteenth season, has been featured on The Food Network and NPR and has been a popular blogger for The Huffington Post. Her first memoir, The Raging Skillet: The True Life Story of Chef Rossi was published by The Feminist Press to rave reviews. In addition to memoir, Rossi has written two full-length plays and several short plays. Rossi resides in Manhattan.

Editorial Reviews

04/08/2024

This memoir pulses and hums like street poetry as Rossi shares a life of not fitting in, escaping a Chasid sect, finding her own way as a chef, and facing, on occasion, the darkest of thoughts: “Death wouldn’t be so bad,” Rossi writes, at one low point. “At least I wouldn’t have to go back to New Jersey.” Rossi has done the difficult emotional heavy lifting of crafting a searing, sharp-elbowed memoir that lays bare a rebellious heart. Born Slovah Davida Shana bas Hannah Rachel Ross, the young woman who would call herself “Rossi” clashed often with her overbearing parents, who, unable to take her rebellion, sent her at age 16 to live within the conservative Lubavitchers, of the Chasidic branch of Judaism, in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights. “You can always trust a boy with a yarmulke,” her Mother advises. Rossi soon finds out that is far from the truth.

Her sheltered life in the Lubavitchers’ brownstone is strange and unpredictable—“it felt a bit like sleeping in a bus station,” Rossi writes, and she laments her beloved music (“Blondie, the B-52s, the Ramones, Led Zeppelin, Pat Benatar”) being taken from her. But at the local sandwich shop, she stumbles on to a group of rabbis smoking marijuana in the back room and realizes all is not as it seems. Redbeard, the Rabbi, grants her permission to move out when she is 17 and begin renting the first in a series of apartments. Later she discovers that Redbeard has put a bounty on her to be beaten and forced out of the neighborhood. She laments, “Sometimes when I drink enough wine, I almost felt happy.”

Rossi owns her punk rock-ness, queerness, and Jewishness. Her writing is deeply human, always straightforward and unblinkingly honest, and she bravely recounts being drugged and enduring sexual assault. This honesty powers both the book and a life of refusing dead ends and blazing new paths. This blistering story never lets the reader let their guard down.

Takeaway: Vital memoir of blazing new paths and coming-of-age in 1980s Crown Heights.

Comparable Titles: Nancy Barile’s I’m Not Holding your Coat, Robert Rosen’s A Brooklyn Memoir

Production grades Cover: A Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: A

BookLife Reviews

"Rossi owns her punk rock-ness, queerness, and Jewishness . . . This blistering story never lets the reader let their guard down."
—BookLife Reviews, EDITOR'S PICK

"A wise, hardscrabble coming-of-age story about finding oneself in an unlikely locale."
—Kirkus Reviews

"The memoir is not only a coming-of-age story but also a commentary on the clash of cultures and the resilience to authentically be yourself no matter what, and this is perfectly clear in the confident, proud narrative voice that carries us through the tale."
—Readers' Favorite (5 STARS)

"I thought I'd heard everything until I read Rossi's memoir. It's a story of resilience, acceptance, food, love, chosen family and the chosen people. What more could you want?"
—Judy Gold, comedian, actress, author, and two-time Emmy winner

“Raised during and after the Holocaust, Rossi’s parents tried desperately to breed fear into their children—of outsiders, of losing touch with the Jewish community, of a demanding God—but Rossi was fearless and hungry for experience. Which explains, and doesn’t, why one day her parents dropped their rebellious lesbian daughter off among the Lubavitch Hasidim to ‘keep her safe’ in a dangerous drug-ridden area of New York City. Rossi was sixteen. The rest can be read as the funny, terrifying coming-of-age/coming-out of one intrepid soul, or as a vibrant portrait of 1980s New York, or as an underbelly view of Crown Heights, because Rossi does it all in this exhilarating, satisfying read.”
—Leah Lax, author of Uncovered

“When Rossi was sixteen her small-minded parents, terrified of her queerness, sent her to live with  Lubavitchers in pre-gentrified Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Because she escaped with her humor and integrity intact, we have this fascinating memoir unveiling the interior life of this cult-like religious Jewish community. While the expected bullying and misogynistic elements are revealed in detail, we also see the misfit subculture of Chasidim. Rossi encountered the Lubavitcher queers, the dopers, the dealers, the thrill-seeking and free-thinking men and women living on the edges of this ultra-conformist society. Her ride is a fascinating one, not only to a lesbian life but also perhaps the more difficult path of challenging the anti-Black racism of both her parents and the religious Jews. A page-turner.”
—Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show and Conflict Is Not Abuse

“Somehow, despite finding herself in tremendously challenging, oppressive, and at times dangerous situations, Rossi holds onto her strength, her rage, her humor, her joy, her neshama (soul) and her heart. . . . This wild ride of a memoir pays tribute to the human spirit. It is an amazing book; I couldn’t put it down.
—Lesléa Newman, author of A Letter to Harvey Milk and Heather Has Two Mommies

“The Punk-Rock Queen of the Jews: You have to read it to believe it. A rollercoaster ride of a not-so-good Jewish girl and her road to redemption. Get ready for jail time, cult busters, flying beef stew, and finally, a great original chef named Rossi.
—Tovah Feldshuh

“Chef Rossi’s intensely personal recollection of Yom Kippur services, September 26, 2001, offers me—the rabbi who led them—a new perspective on an already unforgettable event.  Rossi is a very special storyteller. . . . Take my word about the book as someone in the book: READ the book.”—Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, Senior Rabbi, Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, world's largest LGBT synagogue

From the Publisher

2024-04-03
In this memoir, Rossi describes her unusual young adulthood among the Chasidim of Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Before she was known as Chef Rossi, New York’s wildest wedding caterer, the author was Slovah Davida Shana bas Hannah Rachel Ross. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household in 1960s New Jersey, Rossi was meant to marry a nice Jewish boy and give her parents a brood of grandchildren. The author rebelled against those expectations—by selling pot, listening to the Sex Pistols, and kissing non-Jewish boys (and girls)—until her parents decided that desperate measures were required to bring the 16-year-old Rossi back into the fold. Without warning, her father dropped her off at a town house in Brooklyn. “A buzzing noise made me look up to see what at first glance seemed to be a colony of giant bats,” she recalls. “Two blinks later, and I realized it was a half-dozen Chasidic men staring at me, murmuring to one another in what sounded like Yiddish.” Rossi had been admitted to a program for wayward Jewish girls designed to break them of their bad habits. She spent the next two years living according to a strict interpretation of Jewish law that dictated how she should dress, what she should eat, and how she could spend her time. The characters she met there, and the abuse she suffered, would shape her in ways that her parents never could have imagined. Rossi writes with dark humor and a lyrical sense of detail: “If I had been invisible, I would have walked away, past the black coats on Kingston Avenue, past the drug dealers and catcallers on Eastern Parkway, past the ugly brown buildings and half-dead trees. I would have kept walking over the distant bridge I dreamed of crossing, and into the bright, colorful lights of Manhattan.” This memoir reads like a novel, capturing the exciting era of 1980s New York with grit and precision. Though some of these memories are painful, they’re all brilliantly rendered.

A wise, hardscrabble coming-of-age story about finding oneself in an unlikely locale.

Kirkus Reviews