When We're Born We Forget Everything: A Memoir

As a self-described '90s suburban high school weirdo, Alicia Jo Rabins spent her time practicing violin and smoking cigarettes behind the mall while secretly dreaming of setting out on a spiritual quest no one around her seemed to understand. She often found herself drawn to the more ritualistic and rigorous Judaism that her parents had abandoned to assimilate and "become American." In college, a chance meeting led her on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to study rabbinical texts (and play bluegrass fiddle on the street for cash). But that two years of immersing herself in traditional observance was only the start of a journey full of twists and turns.

When We're Born We Forget Everything follows Alicia's relentless, often embarrassing, sometimes enlightening search for the sacred in everyday life as she tours America playing with a klezmer-punk band, falls in and out of love, scrapes through the initiations of motherhood, and witnesses the beauty--and danger--of mysticism. Interwoven throughout, her brief retellings of Biblical women's stories mirror the mythic structures that permeate contemporary life, bringing the reader on a quest to uncover the feminist teachings that lie buried beneath our patriarchal traditions. The result is both a highly personal, poetic memoir and a universal meditation on spiritual longing.