By the Waters of Paradise: An American Story of Racism and Rupture in a Jewish Family

by Clare Kinberg

In 2016, Clare Kinberg discovered her estranged Aunt Rose's death certificate on the internet. What followed was an unearthing of contradictions of what "family" means in a segregated United States. In the 1930s, Rose, an Ashkenazi Jewish woman, married Zebedee Arnwine, an African American man. The Arnwines faced a multitude of barriers due to their interracial marriage, and Rose faced familial and community ostracization for her choice. Her siblings, including Kinberg's father, kept her existence a secret from their children while building a strong sense of family and reinforcing the segregation between Jewish and Black communities. Some eighty years later, Kinberg, whose wife and daughters are descendants of the African diaspora, traced the life and legacy of her aunt. This masterful memoir weaves the genealogical and historical journeys of Rose and Zebedee with discussion of Rose and Kinberg's Jewish ancestry in Romania and Ukraine and investigates their mutual decisions to settle their interracial families in Michigan. By the Waters of Paradise is a riveting family history that paints a startling portrait of racism and antisemitism and the lasting effects across generations.

Genres: Jewish, Nonfiction, Memoir, Judaism, Biography

224 pages, Paperback

Published October 21, 2025

Reviews

[Jen]

Thank you Wayne State University Press, but this book is just not for me. DNF at page 8. No stars given, as I don’t feel I have read enough to justify my giving a star rating.

[Ann Epstein]

The Ties That Break – The title By the Waters of Paradise: An American Story of Racism and Rupture in a Jewish Family by Clare Kinberg is a summation of the multiple angles brought to bear on the author’s search for an unknown relative. Kinberg sets out to “find” her father’s late sister, Aunt Rose, who was banished from her Jewish family and close-knit St. Louis community for marrying a black man. Her personal search also becomes a historical investigation of race and religion in the last century, strands which Kinberg interweaves in a smooth and provocative narrative. With so much of the story untraceable, she draws on empathy and her own experience being married to a mixed-race woman and raising two black daughters, to imagine what life was like for Aunt Rose, her entrepreneurial husband Zeb Arnwine, and the black lakeside community in Michigan where they settled and opened Zeb’s Bar-B-Q joint. Examining the racism in her family helps Kinberg trace her own abhorrence of the tribal bigotry that poisons all of society. Likewise, she reconciles her faith with the racism and misogyny in Judaism by naming it, acknowledging its role in scripture, then writing new stories that teach alternative lessons on how we are commanded to treat people. As a fiction writer myself (see my Goodreads author page https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...), who creates characters as well as their stories, I admire Kinberg’s inventiveness. She reconstructs a credible life that connects her to the past and the present. Her accumulated knowledge and persuasive storytelling will accomplish the same for readers attempting to patch holes in their own histories.

[Rachel]

What the stories our family tell – or decide not to tell – can influence how we view our lives and the world around us. Sometimes our reactions to the past are positive, which makes us want to preserve and continue the culture/customs with which we grew up. Other times, we feel the need to break from the past: discontinuing behavior/thoughts that we find offensive. Two recent memoirs highlight both of these paths. In “Always Carry Salt: A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture” (Pegasus Books), Samantha Ellis explores ways to preserve the language and traditions of her family’s Iraqi-Jewish heritage, while Clare Kinberg not only seeks information about an estranged aunt, but to challenge her father’s racism in “By the Waters of Paradise: An American Story of Racism and Rupture in a Jewish Family” (Wayne State University Press). Both works offer the connections and disconnections the authors feel about their Jewish heritage.
See the rest of my review at https://www.thereportergroup.org/book...

[Dennis Fischman]

Clare Kinberg's family history had a hole in it where her father's sister Rose used to be. For years, no one talked about Rose, and no one even talked about why.

Clare had an intuition that learning about Rose would reveal a lot about her own life--an intuition that seemed magical when Clare realized that she (a Jewish woman who married a Black woman) was the niece of Rose Kinberg Arwine, a Jewish woman who, decades earlier, had married a Black man.

Telling us the story of her search for Rose gives Clare the chance to fill us in on things like what it was like to come out in the 1970's or to be an interracial couple in the 1930's. By following her family and Rose's as they move, she gives us a living sense of Black and Jewish neighborhoods in St. Louis, Chicago, Oklahoma, and Michigan. Wherever the story goes, she's able to tie it in to other identities and events, from the Greenwood massacre to the founding of Black intentional communities.

Clare has done astounding research on local history: in libraries, newspaper archives, and personal interviews. Where she cannot document Rose's life, she uses her informed imagination to fill in the gaps--a process that Jewish interpreters of text will recognize as midrash!

The storytelling in this book is always captivating, even when the train of thought seems to double back or make unexpected stops. If I read it again (which I might), I will keep in hand the family tree and list of other characters I made up this time. I may also draw up a timeline, the better to appreciate the coincidences and parallels that Clare brings to light.

Full disclosure: I met the author back in the 1980's when we were both active in New Jewish Agenda. Being able to hear the story in her voice probably made me enjoy it even more.

[Emily P.]

This is a poignant examination of family estrangement and lost connection. I was fascinated by the author's journey to understand the role of racism in her family's story. Clare Kinberg thoughtfully pieces together the adult life of her lost Aunt Rose while interspersing information on the fabric of life and race relations in southwest Michigan, Indiana, Texas, and elsewhere. Highly recommended.

[Jodi Perras]

A genealogical journey

Ms. Kinberg’s story is familiar to anyone who has tried to trace the mysteries in their family tree, where we sometimes find our relatives and ancestors’ roles in historical events. Congratulations to the author for documenting her journey in a way that explores difficult passages in America’s history as well as in her own family’s story.