Lewis-Kraus's pilgrimage might have been yet another young man in search of himself, a modern Kerouac with more direction, but I had the sense that the author was more in search of something other than himself. As Huston Smith warned in his work on the world's religions, "The self is too small an object for perpetual enthusiasm." After a few years caught up in the live for the moment decadence of Berlin, Lewis-Kraus craved something more, something that would at once take him inward and outward. For one, he deals with a long simmering discontent with his relationship with his father, a gay former rabbi whose "coming out of the closet" left his son with a sense of abandonment, possibly of even never having been wanted. I do not want to reveal what the author finds out on his journeys since these unfolding revelations, along with his trenchant often self-deprecating humor, are the glories of this book. His new found sense of self, family and kinship with the world outside himself is hard fought for and seems to have cost him about a pound of flesh, mostly from his feet. Of the pilgrimages, the one he makes to Uman with his father and brother delighted me the most, but all are well pace, funny and thoughtful. Lewis-Kraus is by terms endearing, obnoxious, generous, bigoted, peevish, but always searching. Odd thing happened when I was reading the Uman section, though this really says more about another book than this one, I am sharing it since shows what really good writing can do. As Lewis-Kraus and his father deal with the mass of Hasidic Jews I wondered if he knew Cass Seltzer since they were both writers who had dealt with the theme of messianic Judaism. Mind jogged on a bit to remember that this was impossible since Seltzer was the ficitonal creation of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. I was so wound up in the very real account of Gideon's bewilderment with all that was around him that my brain lapsed into that space were the real and imagined collide. And of course, ever since I first met him, Cass Seltzer, despite his non-existence, has always been a real to me as if he were so.