“Selfless”…incorporates the humorous slant of [Slater’s] children’s books, but on a more sophisticated level. [It] is the story of a quirky, apparently anti-religious Jewish family in 1980s Pittsburgh. The hilarious story is told by son Jon, the only member of the family to attend religious school—”so he could have a choice,” says his mother.
No one in the family is quite what they appear, with the possible exception of the grandfather, Leon, a Holocaust survivor who raised his daughter—Jon’s mother— alone. He marries Myna, another survivor, whom he meets when she arrives with her son—Jon’s father—to take his daughter on a blind date. Jon’s parents and grandparents meeting the same night sets the tone for offbeat family dynamics.
The story opens on the eve of what was to have been Jon’s bar mitzvah. The book then goes back to the months leading up to that evening revealing the debacle that curtailed his bar mitzvah…
In the family chapters, Jon’s two older sisters seem intent on permanently damaging his psyche. The family’s household wide intercom system is put to frequent use in schemes and eavesdropping escapades.
When the stridently anti-religious father departs for Israel to “research” his next book in an Orthodox community, the family is shaken. After learning that before his departure he had been meeting secretly with a hassidic rabbi confuses them still further.
“Selfless” is a funny, coming-of-age tale that reveals people are often not what they seem.