Cynthia Ozick: There is nothing in the world like it—Dada plus auto­biography plus chanting cadences plus riddles plus geographies plus histories—in short, a New Thing is born.

Alex Averbuch: Permeating this book is a joyful yet piercing irony – toward the self as well as the world, revealing both Jewish self-criticism and the enduring presence of antisemitism. Cataloguing humanness, marking off the boundaries of nationhood but dissolving them at the same time, Marina Temkina defines, by un-defining, the self, the other, stigma, stereotype, and the universal. With this provocative exploration, she aims to dismantle the ethnonational and the rigid, unsettling what seems settled, so as to reveal what is most deeply human.