Brenda serotte biography

  • Brenda Serotte.
  • Brenda Serotte is a poet and an adjunct professor at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
  • Brenda Serotte grew up in the Bronx in a family of Sephardic Jews who had emigrated from Turkey.

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    The Fortune Teller's Kiss

    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 avvisa 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 cul

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    Subjects

    Anecdotes, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Biography, Bronx (new york, n.y.), Childhood and youth, Familie, General, HISTORY, Historical, Jews, Jews, turkey, Jews, united states, biography, Jüdin, New york (n.y.), biography, Patients, Poliomyelitis, Poliomyelitis, patients, biography, Sephardim, State & Local, Turkish Jews
  • brenda serotte biography

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    The Fortune Teller's Kiss

    "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. . . . 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."—Publishers Weekly


    "Poet Serotte turns to prose to recreate her childhood as a Sephardic Jew in post-WWII New York. . . . Serotte brilliantly recreates the sheer dread the very word 'polio' evoked in those pre–Jonas Salk days. Her descri