Book Description

Acclaimed poet and essayist David Biespiel tells the story of the rise and fall of his Jewish boyhood in Texas, and his search for the answer to his life's central riddle: Are we ever done leaving home? Raised in the 1970s in Meyerland, the historic Jewish neighborhood of Houston, Biespiel explores the story of triumph and shame that changed his relationship to the world around him. With cinematic fluidity, he writes of his early years as a teenager who yearns for bold self-invention as he grapples with the enigmas of illness, death, love, and the meaning of faith. Growing up in a family devoted to Jewish identity, Biespiel comes under the tutelage of the head rabbi of the largest conservative congregation in North America. But after the rabbi kicks him out of the synagogue during a public quarrel, Biespiel leaves Texas and his religious upbringing behind. After a near-forty-year exile, Biespiel returns for a day to the world he left behind as a different person, to offer a moving meditation on the meaning of home, uncovering bittersweet realities of age, youth, and family with tenderness and devastating honesty. Written in the years that followed the devastation of Houston wrought by three 500-year floods in three years-including Hurricane Harvey, the worst flood in Texas history-Biespiel's account is by turns personal and philosophical, a meditation on time's inevitable losses and a writer's hard-won gains. A Place of Exodus is not only a memoir, but an essential companion for anyone who has journeyed far - and equally those who have stayed close to the unresolvable paradoxes of home, the aches of time and heart none of us can escape.