Kasher in the Rye

TW: One of Kasher's many unsuccessful hospitalizations is a unit for kids with intellectual disabilities. Kasher uses the “R word” to describe them numerous times.

How is this memoir written by a former drug addict different from all other memoirs written by former drug addicts? For starters, Moshe Kasher is the hearing child of two deaf parents, and his father was an ultra-Orthodox Jew from the insular Satmar group. He was one of the few white kids - and the only Jew - in his Oakland neighborhood school. And the kicker is that after Kasher got sober, he became a successful stand-up comedian. His obvious intelligence and graveyard humor got me through half of this raw, raunchy saga, before it became both repetitive and increasingly disturbing.

Kasher was an angry kid who resented his parents' deafness, the time he was forced to spend with his father's new family, and his older brother's angelic behavior. He started drinking at the tender age of 12 to stop feeling like shit, moved on to hard drugs, and finally became sober at 16 after realizing that the drugs no longer masked the pain. But in those four years he did some really fucked up shit (physical abuse of his mom, selling drugs to a kid who then had a heart attack, stealing whatever he could to support his habit. Kasher was also suspected of gang-raping a girl; he claimed that his friend tried to have sex with her; she said no, and then went to the police with false rape accusations.).

After almost 300 pages of unsuccessful rehab facilities and futile mental health hospitalizations, Kasher's recovery and young adulthood fly by so quickly in a brief wrap-up chapter that they barely leave an impression after all of the awful stuff. I'm sure Kasher has gone through the 12 steps and made amends to those he hurt, but I don't think I'll ever be comfortable watching him do stand-up comedy again.

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This book about the descent of a very young man into delinquency and addiction (and his eventual recovery) in just about any other hands could've been maudlin, sappy, trite or overly-sentimental. But Kasher's skill shows itself in being honest and articulate while being able to joke about the tragic events described.

That doesn't mean he's making light of anything or glorifying in the problems. But it does seem to allow him some distance from the horror so he can talk about it.

This is a heartbreaking work, eye-opening, educational, incredibly relatable, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. Great, great book.