Turbulent Souls

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

The promise of any story about religious conversion is that in observing a soul's journey from one spiritual home to another, we learn something about spirit. This opportunity is doubled in Dubner's case: his Jewish-born parents embraced a fervent Catholicism; decades later Dubner made the same trip in reverse. He capitalizes neatly on the humor, pain and mystery implicit when a father breaks into the song My Yiddische Mama between rosaries only to have his altar-boy son later edit the writings of the Lubavitcher rebbe; and on the "dead parents and overbearing parents...the fears of emptiness and the hopes of bounty" that inform such God-wrestling. So generous and natural a memoirist is Dubner, however, that awareness of his book's formidable double motor recedes in our pleasure at his recollections.

--By David Van Biema