The Fortune Teller's Kiss Book

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.

Publishers Weekly

Poet Serotte relives a childhood cataclysm in this culture-rich, affecting memoir, part of the American Lives literary nonfiction series. In 1954 she contracted polio, mere months before Jonas Salk perfected his vaccine-a coincidence that struck her Sephardic Jewish household as especially cruel. In this lively subculture, a minority among even New York City's Jews, Serotte earned high praise for her beauty, grace and belly dancing, grooming herself for the proverbial sultan's harem. Old World mysticism imbued everyday life, adding color to a bleak immigrant aesthetic. The family matriarch, Nona Behora, was revered for her ability to read fortunes in Turkish coffee grounds; before her death, she divined misfortune for the author, her granddaughter. The family desperately spouted medieval benedictions to deflect the evil eye, but a prolonged, agonizing hospital stay forced Serotte to work her own miracles with "courage I pulled from somewhere." She explores the identity that confounds her: first, her "bouillabaisse" blood line and, later, the immobility that suspends her between "normal" and "special," as she limns her family with wry affection that doesn't blot out their flaws. The drama of Serotte's struggle to walk again, filtered through the tender emotion of youth, creates an aromatic narrative brew that reveals her destiny in riveting detail. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.