Rabbi's Daughter (Mann)

Book Reviews
A gripping tale of a woman searching in all the wrong places.... The book is hard to put down—it’s so personal and raw.
Sunday Times Magazine (London)

Reva Mann reveals how she rejected the respectability of her London parents for years of wild partying and how she has won her battle with addiction.
Evening Standard (London)

Reva’s gripping memoir of her long journey to find herself. This first-time author has written a compelling book about her own experiences, and...insight into the closed world of Orthodox Judaism.... Her story is fascinating and harrowing in equal measure.
Daily Express (London)

There is more to this book than gratuitous sex...there are moments of profound insights.... Reva’s considerable talent with the English language and profound insights into Judaism are in evidence throughout the book.
Manchester Telegraph (UK)

Sometimes shocking, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes very funny, Reva Mann’s story is a fascinating glimpse into a hidden world.
Elle

In her misspent youth, Mann, a journalist and daughter of a prominent London rabbi and granddaughter of a chief rabbi of Israel, was hooked on drugs and promiscuous sex, which led to hepatitis B infection and an arrest for drug possession. In her 20s, she went to Jerusalem, where again she disappointed her progressive Orthodox parents by marrying a born-again American Jew who had become an obsessive and separatist Hasid. Unhappiness and tragedy were Mann's constant companions: a retarded sister; the abortion of a brain-damaged fetus; the unraveling of her passionless marriage and her disenchantment with Hasidism; breast cancer; and her elderly widowed mother's suicide. Mann parades unsavory aspects of her behavior: she and her boyfriend, Sam, knowingly have raucous sex in earshot of her anxious children, and after Sam's brother is killed in a terrorist attack, Mann is upset that Sam isn't paying enough attention to her at the burial. While Mann's clever, fast-paced memoir offers an intimate glimpse of Orthodox Judaism and aptly demonstrates the human yearning for redemption, some of the events she recounts strain credulity, particularly her deflowering in her father's synagogue and a lesbian affair in an ultra-Orthodox women's yeshiva that is overheard by a religiously zealous tattletale.
Publishers Weekly

Mann tells her story with genuine humor and self-deprecating wit, winning the sympathy of even disapproving readers. Mann’s coming-of-age story speaks directly to young people struggling with questions of family, faith and identity.
Booklist

Jerusalem-based newspaper columnist Mann recounts her struggles with men, procrustean religion, drugs, sex, motherhood, breast cancer and the loss of loved ones. Employing the present tense throughout—perhaps to add an urgency that the narrative doesn't always deliver—the first-time author reveals a profound sadness at her center. The daughter and granddaughter of prominent rabbis, Mann rebelled as a teen with drugs and bad boyfriends. Reeling out of a troubled relationship with a druggie, she decided to move from London to Israel, where she studied midwifery and was attracted to the most fundamentalist form of Judaism she could find. She married a Hassidic scholar and adopted a pious lifestyle that puzzled even her father, a more moderate Jew. As she desperately sought happiness, she found herself increasingly repelled by her husband and his ways. Then a hunk of a handyman came to remodel the kitchen. Leers turned to frantic, clawing, biting sex-there is much explicit detail about her romps with this kitchen aide and with other lovers-which, of course, eventually led to the dissolution of her marriage and anguish for their three children. Later, another relationship with another slovenly drug addict went awry, but not before the author describes some luscious nubile bodies on a nude beach with nipples "soft and pink like candy." Lying on that same beach, she felt a lump, learned that she had breast cancer and endured surgery, chemo and radiation. Along the way, her father died, then her mom, in most disturbing fashion. The author then decides it's time to reunite with her sister, institutionalized back in England with Down's syndrome, whom she hasn't seen in 20 years. She vows to visit once a year from now on. A woeful life, related in prose that's largely hollow and unremarkable.
Kirkus Reviews