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Friday October 26, 2007

Sex, drugs and Talmud

‘Rabbi’s Daughter’ candidly explores a double life

by stacey palevsky
staff writer

Reva Mann is one woman who has lived as two.

She is the daughter and granddaughter of prominent rabbis, who at one time was married to a Chassidic man and lived within the structured realm of strict Orthodoxy.

She also has lived a secular life filled with recreational drugs, sex, rebellion and self-doubt.

She writes about both — and her quest to balance the two personas — in her candid, daring novel “The Rabbi’s Daughter,” which will be released in the United States on Tuesday, Oct. 30.

Already the book has been well received in Mann’s native England, where it was released in August. British reviewers called the story “gripping,” “profound” and “emotionally wrenching.”

Perhaps that’s because Mann’s retelling of her past is raw and honest, with details so personal most would reserve them for their journals.

“This book evokes a lot of emotion and it’s not always easy to read,” Mann said during a telephone interview from her Jerusalem home. “Readers have told me it shakes them up because I’ve been so brutally honest.”

The book took Mann five years to write. She started it while undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. She remembers days when she wrote with tears streaming down her face. Writing her past meant reliving it, and that was often painful, Mann said.

So in her first manuscript, she categorized the book as fiction.

“My editor told me I’d have to take out half of the book because all of these things couldn’t possibly happen to one person, that it wasn’t realistic. And that’s when I realized it had to be written as a memoir. If I was going to write it, I’d have to be brave enough to tell the truth,” she said.

The book takes readers through the highs and lows of Mann’s secular, religious and family life — the drugs, the sex, the yeshiva, the mikvah, the insecurities she felt as a young girl and a grown woman.

The mother of three teenage children (whom she won’t allow to read her book — not yet anyway) thinks of the story as a spiritual journey, one that is ongoing even though the book is finished.

“I’ve been as high on God as I’ve been on dope,” she said. “But now, I’m trying to build a relationship with God that doesn’t have to do with extremes.

“I hope people read this and feel there is hope,” she added. “That whatever has happened to them, whatever they’ve been through, they can change things and move toward a life of balance and wellness.”

Reva Mann will appear 2:15 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 4 at the JCC of San Francisco. Free. Info: www.jccsf.org/bookfest.

“The Rabbi’s Daughter: A Memoir,” by Reva Mann (368 pages, The Dial Press, $24)

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