Review: The Spoon from Minkowitz: A bittersweet Roots Journey to Ancestral Lands by Judith Fein. Santa Fe: GlobalAdventure.us, 2014. $18.95.

Judith Fein, a former screenwriter and now a travel writer with articles in such venues as The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, and National Geographic has written a deeply personal account of her journey in time and space to the stetl in the Ukraine that her grandmother left at the age of seventeen. As a child, Fein was obsessed with this place and could not understand why her grandmother would never tell her more than six facts about where she’d grown up. Given a spoon from Minkowitz, Ukraine by her new father-in-law at her wedding, Fein took this as a sign that she must one day visit, but world traveler that she was, she took decades to embark upon this journey of self-discovery.

Fein is not an observant Jew, but the journey necessarily takes her into corners and collective memories that are distinctly Jewish. The Spoon from Minkowitz is an expedition into personal and cultural identity. However, I continued to be moved by Fein’s insistence on a showing a much bigger picture, on remaining first of all human and writing compassionately of our commonality.

I was especially touched by her comments after a visit to a cemetery of Karaite Jews in Halych, Ukraine. Rabbinic Jews rejected the Karaites because of their differing beliefs, while the Nazis spared them because they also perceived them as non-Jewish. From this paradox, Fein questions how religious beliefs can separate people and even lead to their destruction when carried to an extreme. She so poignantly asks, “Why does anyone care if God is worshipped differently, or if others worship a different God? How do humans descend to such a dark place that they kill other humans because they sit in pews or kneel to pray, wear sidelocks, monks’ robes or turbans, read from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, or the Koran?”

While The Spoon from Minkowitz is about a deep exploration of Jewish roots, it often transcends that to become an exploration of the human condition.

Judith Fein will be the keynote speaker and a workshop presenter at the Albuquerque Jewish Community Center’s A Taste of Honey on February 9.