(RNS) — Passover is about memory. The central commandment at the traditional seder feast is to remember the exodus, the flight of the ancient Israelites from slavery to freedom.
Adam Sobsey’s new book, “A Jewish Appendix: A Memoir,” isn’t about Passover, but it is about tracing the journey his great-grandparents took in 1910 from a small town in northeastern Romania to Ellis Island and eventually to Pittsburgh.
Sobsey, 54, never talked to his great-grandparents about that exodus. In fact, they refused to talk about it to anyone. His parents drifted away from their Jewish observance, and he was left with a Jewish identity in name only — sort of like his appendix that was surgically removed in 2018.
But the following year, Sobsey and his wife, Heather, took “a sort of speculative ancestry tour” to the place his great-grandparents on his mother’s side came from. The book recounts that three-month journey, which also took Sobsey to Albania, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Greece, a tour he realized later, spanned of the borders of the Ottoman Empire.
“I wanted to go and see the place where the people I looked like came from,” wrote Sobsey, who lives in Durham, North Carolina.
As it went on, the trip took on a much more momentous exploration of history, identity and what it means to be Jewish. RNS s …