📕 Part memoir, part history, part travelogue, 'The Wandering Womb' is rich with incisive reflections, personal vulnerability, and dry humor. | ✍️ Emily McClanathan
As a woman, Wisenberg expresses pride in her experience of menses, “the sea that connects me to all women,” yet she furtively discards her feminine hygiene products in public bins while staying with a male acquaintance who has no trash can in his bathroom. She lampoons the superficiality of Greek life while participating in sorority rush as an undercover 29-year-old, only to admit afterward that “deep down, goddammit, I wanted all of it.
In “Grandmother Russia/Selma,” an essay written in 2020, she tells of her ancestors’ migration from Lithuania, then part of the Russian empire, at the turn of the 20th century. “We left the empire and didn’t go back, didn’t look back—because we were not Russian, we were Jews. They wouldn’t let us be Russian,” she writes, adopting the first-person plural as she often does when writing about her family history. “Russia did not care.
When her grandparents and great-grandparents arrived in the southern United States, the nation was only a few decades beyond the Civil War. “In a Black-white society, they were deemed white,” she writes of her Jewish ancestors. “They wore their bestowed whiteness fearfully, then naturally.” Wisenberg is clear-eyed about the complexity—and complicity—of assimilation during the Jim Crow era, noting that she was born in a segregated Houston hospital only three months after Emmett Till was murdered.
Numerous essays are not specifically about Jewish themes but address elements of womanhood at various stages of life. I especially connected with several pieces written during or about her late 20s and early 30s . In “Spy in the House of Girls”—the aforementioned essay about her incognito, belated experience of sorority rush—Wisenberg looks back on her college years, not so much with nostalgia but with a wistfulness for what might have been.
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