"Chaya Pollack has written a remarkable memoir about a remarkable life. From her damaged childhood through marriage, motherhood and divorce, a year-long trip around the world, many years teaching healing and meditation, to-ultimately-her own healing, this is an extraordinary story. Told in vignettes and poetry, written with unflinching honesty and grace, Bicycling Without Brakes is a compelling read."
--Lynn Blankman
"The memoir of a nonagenarian, Bicycling Without Brakes, with painterly attention to detail and gesture, gathers together the astonishment of a human life. At times tender, often unflinching, and always canny, Pollack's writing reveals the complexities beneath the surface of that strange and sacred thing: fully lived life."
--Elizabeth Ferris
"Chaya's writing paints pictures of her life, with its trials and triumphs. I felt like I was walking through the art gallery of her life."
--Linda Lutes
"Chaya Sarah Sadeh Pollack dares to tell the whole truth of a long life. In Bicycling Without Brakes, she navigates childhood trauma, poverty, addiction, and lost love with unflinching directness, clarity, and vulnerability. Nevertheless, the unbearable always returns to joy. As she writes, "When the darkness came, I found my way back to the laughter at the table." She invites us into that joy--the savor of fresh-baked bread, the warmth of family laughter, the beauty of art, and the long-forged peace of late love. Chaya weaves her vignettes over nine turbulent decades, always shunning sentimentality or self-pity. With prose as direct as the path of a brakeless bicycle, this memoir illuminates the courage it takes to name what breaks us and to accept the grace that heals. The memoir is a testament to resilience, vulnerability, and the quiet acts that keep us alive. Prepare to be gripped by a story that holds both shadow and light, and the author's singular, indomitable voice."
--Dr. Cindy Cunningham
