PRAISE FOR
A River Could Be a Tree
“Inspiring and brave, A River Could Be a Tree defines what we all need in some way—the freedom to discover our own unique path in life and the courage to choose it. Throughout Angela’s journey of self-discovery and spiritual awakening, we recognize beauty in the uncertainty of life. Her ability to illuminate this is a true gift to her readers, and her story serves as a powerful reminder that we don’t have to settle for what is expected of us. We can all find pieces of ourselves reflected in this delightful memoir.”
— RUTH WARINER,
author of The New York Times bestseller, The Sound of Gravel: A Memoir
“In A River Could Be a Tree, Angela Himsel falls in love with Judaism, and we fall in love with her. Her passion, humor, and curiosity shine through as she discovers it isn’t the answers that give life meaning, but the quest for answers and the people met along the way.”
— CHARLOTTE ROGAN,
author of The Lifeboat
“Angela Himsel’s memoir A River Could Be a Tree is one woman’s incredible journey down the proverbial road to Damascus, except that Angela’s conversion was more process than presto. This coming-of-age memoir takes the reader from the faith of a childhood immersed in the Worldwide Church of God, to Orthodox Jewish New York, by way of Israel and Germany. Angela traces her genealogical and theological roots in a search for identity and connection, and gives her readers stories of heartbreak, humor, longing, and love.”
— LUCIA GREENHOUSE,
author of fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science
“Adherents to any faith know well that religion can be both constricting and fulfilling at the same time. And at the core of everyone’s spiritual journey is a belief that we are all seekers, searching for something deeper beyond ourselves. Himsel eloquently embodies this notion in her compelling new memoir. In often raw and engaging fashion, she takes her readers along for the ride— through love, loss, and religious rearrangement— to a conclusion that is both satisfying and enlightening.”
— BENYAMIN COHEN,
author of My Jesus Year: A Rabbi’s Son Wanders
the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith
“A River Could Be a Tree is an odyssey of love and faith, told in a voice mixed with pathos and humor. Angela Himsel shows us how intricate, layered, and painful are the bounds of family, and finally how it is possible to honor both the ties we are born with and the ones we choose to create on our own.”
— GABRIELLE SELZ,
author of Unstill Life: A Daughter’s Memoir of Art
and Love in the Age of Abstraction
“Honest, yet humane, Himsel masterfully describes her spiritual walk along life’s long and narrow bridge from an impoverished childhood in rural Indiana with parents fiercely devoted to an apocalyptic cult, and ending in the embracing warmth of the Jewish community of the Upper West Side. Her journey is a testament to the importance of having no fear. In this regard, Himsel is not just a force of nature; she’s the Mary Karr (author of The Liar’s Club and Lit) of Indiana.”
— MORT ZACHTER,
author of Dough: A Memoir, winner of the AWP Award
Copyright © 2018 by Angela Himsel
By Arrangement with The Deborah Harris Agency
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Fig Tree Books LLC,
Bedford, New York
Jacket design by Jennifer Carrow Design
Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Upon Request
ISBN 978-1-941493-24-3
eISBN 978-1-941493-25-0
Printed in the United States
Distributed by Publishers Group West
First edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Author’s Note
In writing this memoir, I relied not only on my own memory of events, but also interviewed my parents, cousins, aunts, siblings, and others to fill in gaps and to confirm (or dispute) my own recollection. If, despite my very best efforts, I got something wrong, I apologize.
The following names are pseudonyms: Mr. and Mrs. Davis; Aziz, Eve, Laila, and Suleiman.
FOREWORD
by Shulem Deen
As a child, little held my imagination as did the mystery of the Sambatyon River.
Like every Hasidic child in our insular enclave in Brooklyn, I was raised on the stories of the Bible and Talmud. From an early age, I learned of the Israelites who’d been driven away by Sennacherib the king of Assyria, who conquered the northern kingdom of Israel and scattered our brethren tribes to places unknown. That left only us, the Judeans—the tribes of Judah and Benjamin—as the known remnants of the ancient people of Israel. The others became known as the ten lost tribes.
Lost—except we knew one thing: they lived beyond the Sambatyon River, which we could not cross. For one thing, according to Talmudic tradition, the Sambatyon prevents passage by tossing boulders in the air six days a week, resting only on the Sabbath when crossing a river is forbidden. More importantly, the Sambatyon’s very location remains a mystery. And so the ten lost tribes remain apart from us until the Messiah will come and lead us to them, at which time the Sambatyon will rest forever.
I remember, at around age ten, studying a world atlas and wondering how it was that we could not find the Sambatyon. The remotest islands in the Pacific, the forbidding peaks of the Himalayas, the enormous Amazon River snaking its way through thousands of miles of dense jungle, all were fully charted. Only the Sambatyon they could not find?
How could the lost tribes have gotten so lost?
Turns out, they were just living in Indiana.
Or so believed Angela Himsel, who, in her memoir A River Could Be a Tree, tells us about her upbringing in Jasper, Indiana, within the Worldwide Church of God, an apocalyptic, doomsday Christian sect led by Herbert Armstrong, a former Ku Klux Klan member who preached a version of British Israelism, a doctrine that claims the ten lost tribes ended up in Great Britain. Armstrong himself claimed to be descended from those lost tribes, and so his followers, too, at least spiritually, were identified with them.
Angela Himsel was similarly raised on stories. To a young Angela, seventh of eleven children, the biblical figures of Adam, Noah, and Joseph were as real as her shotgun-toting Catholic grandfather and her Lutheran German-speaking grandmother. “I was a literal-minded child,” she writes. “I imagined God hanging out in the neighborhood, popping up on the street unexpectedly. I wished God would do that still, show up at the courthouse square in Jasper or maybe just appear in the backyard while we were playing Red Rover.”
It is not