The Rabbi’s Daughter

“The Rabbi’s Daughter”, Reva Mann’s first novel, is a painfully honest, vivid and intimate memoir explicitly deciphering her painful yet enlightening journey of self discovery as a result of continually running away from an unsettling reality.

    Nurtured in an Orthodox home in London with infinite laws and restrictions, Reva also faces the additional expectations of being granddaughter of the Chief Rabbi Israel, as well as a Rabbi's daughter. Independent and free thinking Reva’s only answer is to reject that which is being forced upon her and to determine her own future. However, Reva's youth and naiveté leads her to experience countless unfortunate predicaments, fleeting from one extreme to the next. Being thrown out of her house for having a non Jewish boyfriend, contracting hepatitis B and being arrested for owning hash leads her to question her decisions and her very identity. From then on, she becomes aware of her eccentricity.

    The novel is brimming with action from start to finish, providing the reader with the most shocking detailed descriptions of the not-so-kosher and scandalous shenanigans of “Randy Reva, the Rabbis daughter”, and often leaves readers gasping with disbelief.

    The readers are introduced to Reva during a Torah study session at seminary, an establishment where girls immerse themselves in religious studies all day. Immediately, readers understand that this way of life is unfamiliar to Reva as she begins to unravel her unorthodox past of sex, drugs, non-Jewish boyfriends and lesbian affairs in a series of flashbacks. The flashbacks throughout the novel effectively provide the readers with a complete overview of Reva’s life from a young age to the present day.

   However, the novel is not merely an account of Reva’s outrageous demeanour and sex antics, but a sincere account of what drove her to these unbelievable extremes, and how she attempts to find a healthy balance. Reva went through childhood yearning for love, acceptance and understanding from her parents. Her reality is a verbally abusive mother and a father who is too rigid and cold, and never content with her decisions. Additionally, growing up with a sister who is handicapped and then sent away to a special home has a tremendously disastrous affect on Reva, which her parents fail to recognize.

    All of this overwhelming anxiety often leaves Reva turning to sex to numb her feelings. Losing her virginity in her father’s sacred synagogue at a young age, she thereafter allows sex to become her ritual refuge for avoiding and ignoring her reality. Reading about her sordid attempts to gain love and acceptance from nameless faces and trying to numb the pain of rejection makes the readers really sympathise with her, and feel the pain that she suffers.

    Reva literally experiences both extremes of Judaism and everything in between, from eating a hot bacon sandwich Saturday morning at work on the market to marrying a Hassid, a member of an Ultra Orthodox sect of Judaism.

    Ultimately, Reva wants to be happy. She is uncomfortable in her own skin, and admires the religious women she meets in Jerusalem, wishing she could be like them. This is what drives her to religion. However, she soon realizes that this is yet another escape from reality.

    Reva always looks for the right answer; however, she is forever looking in the wrong places.