There was always the incantation: 'Whoever wishes you harm, may harm come to them!' And just in case that didn’t work, there were garlic and cloves to repel the Evil Eye-or, better yet, the dried foreskin from a baby boy’s circumcision, ground to a fine powder. But whatever precautions Brenda Serotte was subjected to, they were not enough. Shortly before her eighth birthday, in the fall of 1954, she came down with polio-painfully singled out in a world already marked by differences. Her bout with the dreaded disease is at the heart of this poignant and heartbreakingly hilarious memoir of growing up a Sephardic Jew among Ashkenazi neighbors in the Bronx. This was a world of belly dancers and fortune tellers, shelter drills and vast quantities of Mediterranean food; a world of staunchly joined and endlessly contrary aunts and uncles, all drawn here in loving, merciless detail. The Fortune Teller’s Kiss is a heartfelt tribute to a disappearing culture and a paean to the author’s truly quirky clan, especially her beloved champion, her father. It is also a deft and intimate cultural history of the Bronx fifty years ago and of its middle-class inhabitants, their attitudes toward contagious illness, womanly beauty, poverty, and belonging.

Brenda Serotte

Bison Books

United States, United States of America

Lincoln, Neb, 2012], c2006

Illustrated, 2012

xii, 220 pages : 23 cm
This is the memoir of a Sephardic Jewish girl living among Ashkenazi neighbors in the Bronx. She comes down with polio just before her eighth birthday. She begins a fight against immobility set within a cultural realm where Catholic and Jew and Turkish Moslem once met. Where a beautiful aunt could be abducted into a Turkish harem and another aunt could still keep the 400-year-old iron key to the family house in the Cordoba of the Spanish Inquisition
"Updated with discussion questions"--Cover
Turks -- Fortuna -- Lost -- Contagious -- Grace -- Northern lights -- Quiche lorraine -- Celebrity

2023-06-28