Memoirs of love and loss: a seminar with Rodge Glass and Jay Prosser

This seminar introduces the recently published memoirs 'Loving Strangers: A Camphorwood Chest, A Legacy, A Son Returns' by Jay Prosser and 'Joshua in the Sky' by Rodge Glass and explores memoir as a genre for negotiating complex identities that span ethnic, religious, national, and family boundaries.

Joshua dies on his birthday. Joshua dies the day he is born. Joshua lives for three hours. Joshua is alive.

Rodge Glass’s nephew Joshua died the same day he was born, from a blood condition they both share.

Joshua in the Sky charts the five years around Joshua’s life and death as Rodge attempts to make sense of this loss.

A family memoir and a memorial to a short life, it asks the questions: Whose life deserved to be remembered? And how?

Loving Strangers: A Camphorwood Chest, A Legacy, A Son Returns has already won the Hazel Rowley Prize (US, 2020) for the best proposal for a first-time biographer and was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize (UK, 2019) for the best unpublished biography.

Jay Prosser is writing a family memoir that at its core, builds a bridge across the terrible divides of our times. It’s a Jewish book, but not Just a Jewish book. It moves Jewish writing away from its customary setting of the Holocaust and Europe, transporting Jewish identity instead to Iraq, India, China and Singapore: places and cultures that most people (including Jews themselves) don’t associate with Jewish identity. It shows Jews integrating with others, not divisive, not separate: not antagonistic.

The issue of intermarriage is increasingly important for all racial groups and this book speaks beyond the Jewish community, in relation to how we treat strangers in the form of immigrants and other communities.