First Review of Crooked Lines

 

I've been away this week visiting family and celebrating my birthday - and honestly, that's taken up all of my head space so I didn't have time to write very much, and I'm sorry. I had all kinds of ideas and then I was so excited to see everyone, every thought I had floated away.

What I WOULD like to share is my first review of Crooked Lines: a Single Mom's Jewish Journey. It was published four days ago in the American Jewish World:

https://www.ajwnews.com/writer-jewish-questions/

"... A reader needn’t be divorced or even Jewish to connect with Zark’s thoughts and experiences; many are universal.

For example: “For the first year of my son’s life, I was done wanting to be an award-winning playwright or write novels or musicals. All I wanted to do was to sleep. I did not succeed.”

Nor need one live in the Twin Cities area, although that adds enjoyment.

“It was late August and I was packing up everything I own to move across town to the bottom half of a duplex,” Zark says. “My son, age 4, would live there part of the time with me and part of the time with his dad in our old house,” she says.

“I was moving to St. Anthony Park, hardly known for its Jewish traditions.” But she brought two sets of dishes to continue keeping kosher and confronted the new experience of buying a mezuza.

Single, “my invitations dried up. … I discovered that Jewish Minnesota can be a notoriously close-knit community.” (Amen.) She writes movingly about efforts to get invited to a seder. 

The pieces in Crooked Lines are brief, insightful and easy to read...

Zark is surprisingly revealing about the difficulties of being a working single mother; needing to learn more about Jewish traditions; deciding which to observe and how; and choosing a second husband."

--American Jewish World writer Neal Gendler

Crooked Lines will be published September 5, 2022. You can preorder at jennazark.com. And if you're a single mom - or dealing with intermarriage - or losing your parents -- I'd love to hear your story, too.