This image is the cover for the book Roots Schmoots

Roots Schmoots

From a Booker Prize-winning author, an “informed and witty” travelogue exploring America, Israel, Lithuania, and the nature of Jewish identity (Publishers Weekly).

Howard Jacobson had been hoping to make a journey to Lithuania to search for his Jewish roots. So when the BBC offered to send him around the globe to report on a variety of Jewish communities, he accepted. The trip he recounts in this memoir takes him to New York City, where tension simmers between Jews and African Americans; to California, where he visits a gay synagogue; to Israel, where he encounters the spectrum of Jewishness from Orthodox right-wing hardliners to tolerant, peace-loving kibbutzniks. And ultimately, to Lithuania, the land of his forefathers, where he discovers that antisemitism still lurks.

“A lively, irreverent but ultimately serious account of a British Jew’s search for his roots.” —Elizabeth Benedict, The New York Times

“Profound and moving.” —Publishers Weekly

Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson was born on August 25, 1942 in Manchester, England. He is a Man Booker Prize-winning British author and journalist. He studied English at Downing College, Cambridge under F. R. Leavis. He lectured for three years at the University of Sydney before returning to England to teach at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His later teaching posts included a period at Wolverhampton Polytechnic from 1974 to 1980. His time at Wolverhampton was to form the basis of his first novel, Coming from Behind, a campus comedy about a failing polytechnic that plans to merge facilities with a local football club. He also wrote a travel book in 1987, titled In the Land of Oz, which was researched during his time as a visiting academic in Sydney. His fiction, particularly in the six novels he has published since 1998, is characterized chiefly by a discursive and humorous style. His 1999 novel The Mighty Walzer, about a teenage table tennis champion, won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing. In October 2010 Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Finkler Question, which was the first comic novel to win the prize since Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils in 1986. In 2013 he made The New York Times Best Seller List with his title Whole Rethinking the Science of Nutrition which he co-authored with T. Colin Campbell.

The Overlook Press