THE BEACH BOY

Rabbi and attorney Semenow tells the story of his life from birth to middle age in this first of two memoirs.

The author was born to a Jewish family in Long Beach, New York, in the late 1940s. He lived in a three-decker with his loving parents and extended family members, and he writes of cultural touchstones that readers will find familiar, such as his desire to get a decoder ring and his admiration of comic-strip boxer Joe Palooka. At the State University of New York at Stony Brook in the 1960s, he headed the student court, presaging his later interests. In his early adulthood, he got a draft deferment during the Vietnam War and attended the Woodstock music festival. He was accepted to medical school in Barcelona, but barely attended class; there, he met his wife, Anna Maria. They came back to the U.S. together, and he attended law school at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University. He eventually settled on bankruptcy law as a specialty, and he offers a long, informative disquisition about how Chapter 13 bankruptcy appealed to him as the most humane of options, allowing honorable debt repayment without personal humiliation. It turned out to also be a lucrative field for him and his partner; they expanded by opening another practice in New York City, but there, he says, “it became clear to us that almost everyone on our payroll was stealing from us.” It was a “very expensive lesson,” he says, but an important one. Later, he embraced Orthodox Judaism, which made him happy and fulfilled. Throughout this memoir, he presents accounts of engaging cases and other anecdotes, drawing on his time as a criminal attorney and a real estate speculator. There are also moments that show that he would likely be a wonderful storyteller in person, as when he tells of knowing Yoko Ono before she was famous (“She was trying to be a poet. She was terrible”) and of seeing the Velvet Underground: “mesmerizing—especially Nico, whose voice was haunting.”

An engaging remembrance by a likable author.