Kasher in the Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16

by Moshe Kasher

As early as I can recall, adults have been telling me there was something wrong with me. I was passed around, adult to adult, each one throwing their hands up and declaring, “I don’t know what’s wrong with him either!” Adults talked about me like that, right in front of me, all the time, as if my mother’s deafness somehow applied to me by association. I’d spend time in the mirror, trying to figure out what was looking back at me, what weird alien thing I was. According to my mother, I was born out of control, a feral kid, wild at heart and physically unable to handle the energy and ferocity of my own body. If you could see my little Jew body now, you would find that very difficult to believe. I’d snarl and snap, I’d bite and foam, I’d shake with anger when the slightest thing didn’t go my way, and my body would seize in convulsions of rage and uncontrollable emotion. Frightened, my mother sent me to a therapist. I was four years old. That is a demarcation point in my life. I was booted into the therapeutic garden and left to wander, entering an old rusty gate guarded by the ghosts of Freud and Jung. Being told, still wet from the womb, that you need therapy, it almost makes a boy feel broken.