Jacob's Voices: Reflections of a Wandering American Jew / A three-generation narrative, Jacob's Voices is the autobiography of an American Jew who discovered in Israel a way to unravel the legacy of Jewish ambivalence transmitted by his immigrant grandfather and American father.
Auerbach begins with recollections of a New York Jewish boyhood in the 1940s and 1950s. The themes are acculturation and social mobility, accompanied by sublimation of Jewishness in personal success and liberal politics. But his is a narrative of self-discovery that unfolded both in his American home and in the Jewish homeland. An unexpected visit to Israel caused a series of encounters with Jewish memory, both personal and historical. He tells of his own about-face in terms of Jewish identity. Finding pockets of Jewish memory in Israel, Auerbach heard the voice of his grandfather Jacob for the first time - and thus discovered his own. However, the Israel he explored makes most American Jews and many Israelis intensely uncomfortable because it contradicts their liberal assumptions.
Auerbach sets much of Jacob's Voices in Israel, where he sets his quest for Jewish identity within the larger struggle of the Jewish state to define itself. Ironically, Auerbach left liberalism for Judaism even as Israel redefined Zionism as liberalism. In the end, after seriously considering moving to Israel, he returned to the United States. He analyzes the reasons - historically rooted in Jewish emancipation - why he believes Israel has become merely a state of the Jews, evolving into an appendage of the United States rather than a Jewish state. Ultimately, then, Jacob's Voices asks what it means to live as an American Jew in the United States and Israel at the end of the twentieth century.
