A River Could Be a Tree: A Memoir - Hardcover

Angela Himsel is a freelance writer based in New York City whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Jewish Week, the Forward, Lilith Magazine, BOMB Magazine and several other outlets. Her weekly column “Angetevka” on Zeek.net examined her life as an observant Jew on Manhattan’s Upper West Side against the backdrop of her fundamentalist Christian upbringing in Jasper, Indiana. For this body of work, Himsel received the American Jewish Press Association’s Rockower Award for Excellence in Commentary. She holds a BA in religious studies from Indiana University, which included a two-year stint studying at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and also has an MFA in creative writing from The City College of New York. Himsel is represented by The Deborah Harris Agency. More information can be found at AngelaHimsel.com.

Shulem Deen is a writer, journalist, and author of the award-winning memoir "All Who Go Do Not Return." He is a regular contributor to the Forward, and in 2015 was listed in the Forward 50, an annual list of American Jews with outsized roles on political and social issues. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Salon, Tablet magazine, and elsewhere. He serves as a board member at Footsteps, a New York City-based organization that offers assistance and support to those who have left the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. He lives in Brooklyn.

My parents were perplexed when I told them I wanted to spend my junior year in Israel. I was perplexed that they were perplexed. Hadn't we all sat in church for years and years listening to the minister and reading our Bibles and studying about the place in which God appeared, where the spiritual world met the physical plane? Wasn't Israel as much our spiritual home as Germany was our physical one?

Although going to Jerusalem to connect with my spiritual DNA made logical sense to me, it was considered a crazy, impulsive whim to both my parents and my siblings. In his end-of-the-world tone, my father warned me, "It's a powder keg over there! Jesus has to return lest all flesh should perish.'

My mother, however, clipped a bunch of newspaper articles about Israel to try to help me prepare. But I wasn't interested in what was going on there at that moment. It was biblical Israel I planned to inhabit.