When We're Born We Forget Everything: A Memoir - Hardcover

by Alicia Jo Rabins (Author)

From the creator of the internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter project Girls in Trouble, a memoir following her journey from a secular Jewish childhood to becoming a modern queer woman owning ancient teachings and finding her own meanings in them, refracted through feminist interpretations of the lives of Biblical women.

"Alicia Jo Rabins writes as if she's in conversation with the divine itself. . . .This isn't merely a book to be read--it's a scripture for the searching heart, a reminder that the border between the human and the holy is, and always has been, porous."
--Reza Aslan, author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

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. Rabins braids this personal narrative with the hidden stories of biblical women, uncovering a path of queer identity, feminist awakening, and spiritual self-invention. This lyrical, searching memoir is a meditation on longing, lineage, and what it takes to find meaning in a fractured world.

Author Biography

ALICIA JO RABINS is an award-winning writer, musician, and Jewish educator. She is the author of Divinity School (winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize) and Fruit Geode (finalist for the National Jewish Book Award), and the creator of Girls in Trouble, a feminist indie-folk song cycle about biblical women. Her feature film A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff was called "a blessing" by The Atlantic. Rabins holds an MFA in poetry and an MA in Jewish women's studies. She tours internationally as a performer and teacher.