James McBride is truly an exquisite storyteller and weaver of black and white tributes. He describes his mother's resistance to "come clean" with her story. When she at last agrees, he reveals her personal portrait and testimony of Jewish pride and rejection and ultimate triumph as a Christian woman in a Black world.
McBride beautifully overlaps every other chapter of her story with his unfolding as a boy, then a man, who finds his own Black-Jewish voice through his writing and saxophone playing.
A powerful, gripping story which is at once inspiring and encouraging. It has been an uplifting source for healing and rejoicing my own white and black story!
This book is one of the best out there, from 1996, when it was released to now, 10 years later. Savour it, read it aloud with your book group, your best friends, a support group and your children.
It's spellbinding...
Pie Dumas - Author & Life Coach

James McBride creates a not-very-flattering portrait of race in America in this outstanding story of his white Jewish mother and black father and stepfather. Ruth McBride was born an Orthodox Jew who came to America at the age of two. The product of a traditional, arranged, loveless marriage, her family lived in the South, and from a young age she found warmth and love only in the black community. As a teenager she left home for New York, married a black man, raised 8 children, founded a church in Brooklyn, and married again as a widow and raised another 4.

Her Jewish family cut her off as if dead, and so too was her Jewish self dead, as she lived in the black community in a white world that treated her with contempt and treated her children as black. And that was fine with James, who was deeply ashamed to have a white mother, at least until he became an adult and realized her extraordinary strength and courage and faith. It took him 14 years to unearth her story, and when published 10 years ago, this memoir was a literary sensation.

Ruth had the good fortune to marry two extraordinary black men, and her Christian faith carried her past all the obstacles society created in the post-WWII period. White society scorned her for marrying black men, and her children were segregated as all other black children at that time--there has never been a "half-white" category in America. But Ruth did not let this stop her from sending her children to the best schools possible, and all 12 today are college graduates, with a good number of doctors thrown in for good measure. Throughout she was accepted and supported by her black neighbors and friends and churches. We may balk now reading of her iron discipline and corporal punishment, but it was always tempered by the love of both a mother and father. We may wonder if it would have been better for her to be open about her past with her children, but she transformed herself from Ruchel Shilsky to Ruth McBride as a matter of survival. This is an extraordinary story of an admirable woman's survival in the less than admirable society of the time, and well worth your time.

For nearly 10 years now, I have given this book to others as a gift, especially those who are interested in profound, moving literature. This book FLOWS and speaks to all of us: black, white, Jewish, gentile, young, old. I recommend this book to those I work with, to my son's high school English teachers, to anyone who is searching for a satisfying, uplifting experience. I say experience rather than 'book.' To me, reading this book is an experience. I pull it out and re-read it every year. It encourages me to face hardships, to count my blessings and to recognize that all of us are put on earth for a reason. Thank you, James McBride, for a book that has become a cornerstone in my life.