Intimate personal essays explore themes of religious identity, femininity and belonging
I first heard the term “wandering Jew” in the garden, a reference to the creeping, vine-like tradescantia zebrina, a plant commonly found in garden beds and containers throughout the Deep South.
It's a hardy plant, easy to grow, with vibrant purple-green leaves and vines that spread quickly, voraciously, indeed "wandering" in search of a place to drop their roots.
A hasty Google search led me to the anti-Semitic origins (shocker!) of the term “wandering Jew,” and yet I found myself wanting to reclaim the label. As a Jew who comes from generations who have wandered — sometimes on account of being forced out, sometimes on account of curiosity — I now find myself planted in soil far from my place of origin.
It's no wonder that my thoughts strayed to tradescantia zebrina, to the names that we inherit and the ones we claim for ourselves, as I read “The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home.” Throughout the collection, author S.L. Wisenberg pries open history, myth and memory as she makes sense of herself as a Jewish woman in a world that has conflicting notions of what womanhood or Jewishness should look like or mean.
In the book's opening essay, “Female Protection,” Wisenberg writes about a research trip to Austria, during which she gets her period: “My Jewish Shame seemed the same as my menstrual shame, the clot that I scrubbed from the floor of the square bathtub.” In the end, she finds a restroom in the Sigmund Freud museum, where Freud lived and worked until 1938 when he had to flee from the Nazis. There she finds the “perfect metal trash basket for my American/Jewish/female unmentionables.”
Any reader who's gotten their period in an unfamiliar, public place will identify with the discomfort of that experience, yet Wisenberg goes a step further to interrogate the origins of her shame. Again and again throughout this collection, Wisenberg offers up her own deeply personal experiences in service of larger political and philosophical questions.
In “Mikvah: That Which Will Not Stay Submerged,” Wisenberg braids together her experience at the Jewish ritual bath with the historic and religious significance of the mikvah. The mikvah is so vital to traditional Jewish life that there are accounts of Jewish women in the Soviet Union using “axes to crack through frozen rivers, to get to their nature-made mikvahs.”
After submerging in the water meant to purify her body, Wisenberg admits to feeling like an “imposter” in the Orthodox mikvah, questioning her own impulse to partake as much as the misogyny embedded in the history of female ritual purification: “What is the new ritual to acknowledge the fact that the religion was not made for us, for me, that we have to manipulate it and change everything so that it's meaningful and that that's a sorrowful and exhausting task?”
Wisenberg now lives in Chicago, and her essays take us to places like Paris, Poland, Miami and Vienna. But I found her writing on her southern roots to be especially poignant (her grandparents and great-grandparents arrived to the southeast 30-40 years after the end of the Civil War).
Born in a segregated Houston hospital, just three months after the murder of Emmett Till, Wisenberg writes: “I did not teach myself much. I let myself be pushed along the waves of others' approval. That's what a girl-child does, a Jewish girlchild with asthma and shyness …”
Later, in “The Year of the Knee Sock,” Wisenberg wryly recounts an early education in fashion and femininity gleaned from the department store Neiman Marcus: “We trusted Neiman's … NM was like us, Jewish and Texan and established.”
The essays in “The Wandering Womb” are inquisitive and funny, full of interesting personal tangents, morsels of history and intimate confessions. This collection should be thoughtfully savored. As S.L. Wisenberg peels back the layers of her own identity with vulnerability and care, she invites us to do the same.
— Lauren Rhoades is grants director at the Mississippi Arts Commission and the founder of Rooted Magazine, an online publication dedicated to telling stories of place from the people who call Mississippi home. Her memoir Split the Baby is forthcoming from Belle Point Press in 2025.