Abby Chava Stein

Pretty standard trans memoir, but the insight into Chassidic Brooklyn was very interesting!

Edit: It's pretty funny that this is apparently a mashup of a bog-standard Off The Derekh* memoir and a bog-standard trans memoir, and reviewers are mostly reacting positively to the part they're not already familiar with. TBH, good for her. She had to go through it, and there's clearly a hunger for both narratives from the cis/non-frum mainstream, so she deserves to take the easy money and run!

* (off the path; leaving orthodox jewish observance)… (més)

See my notes on my blog www.bookishinthemitten.com.

I spent most of this book waiting for that point when Abby came out as transgender, treating the text prior to this as exposition while waiting for her to get the point.

This was faulty reading on my part. I wish I had realized early on that while it was the story of Abby's gender transition, and I believe just as importantly for Abby, the story of her path out of her Hasidic community and into a Judaism she can embrace, and which embraces her.… (més)

Becoming Eve is both a memoir which recounts Abby Stein's early life as a member of a Hasidic Jewish family and her realisation that she's a trans woman, and an explanation of a sheltered and separationist religious community—in her case, the Hasidic communities of Brooklyn—to secular non-members. English is not Stein's first language, nor even her second, so I'm willing to grant her a lot of leeway on her prose on that basis, but while I found this an interesting and even important read, I didn't think that it was that good as a book. It's at times fairly surface/basic in terms of analysis—as if it was being written with say a teenage audience in mind—and there's surprisingly little in here at all about her actual transition or the two years or so leading up to it. I would have liked to read more exploration on Stein's part about what happened during that period, especially since she hints that the period between the birth of her son and her leaving Williamsburg was a time of intense dysphoria/crisis, but I presume that this is at least in part to protect her ex-wife and son.… (més)