Naomi Karz Jacobs - The Builder's Daughter

The West Coast Jewish Theatre

The Builder's Daughter
by Naomi Karz Jacobs
Seven Locks Press
2006

Buy on Amazon.com or at Barnes and Noble, Borders and Duttons

With a light touch and a discerning eye, Naomi Karz Jacobs has produced a highly original work that finally does justic to the subject of Jewish family life in America since the 1920s.

The beautiful Russian grandmother who uses a garden hose to wash the floor; the generous mother who was once "the Sarah Bernhardt of the Russian stage;" the father, a successful builder and a collector of wisdom who teaches his children to survive ... These personalities shape the character of the young Naomi, who eventually combines her mother's love of drama and her father's nuts-and-bolts approach to life to create the West Coast Jewish Theatre in Los Angeles.

Hundreds of actors, directors, and playwrights - including some of the very famous - have joined Jacobs in her continuous celebration of Jewish culture. As a playwright, she terms her love life, "a tragicomedy," and the romantic vignettes in this book define her as a brilliant humorist. Men and women alike will appreciate her story of one person's fight to survive and thrive in the choppy waters of love and divorce.

Jacobs addresses the question "What is Life?" with a wisdom that lingers long after you have finished the book.

A Note from the author

“How false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life,” writes William Faulkner in Light in August.

My book, The Builder’s Daughter, is more than a memoir about growing up in a Jewish immigrant family in the 1930’s in Los Angeles. It provides a lens through which to look at larger issues such as women’s limited opportunities of the time, stories about my idiosyncratic Grandmother who lived with the family, celebration of ethnicity, personal struggles and years of single motherhood.

Sharing my intimate feelings about relationships, both difficult and loving, with my own style of humor, warmth and open-mindedness, I take the reader through the courage it took for me to go back to college, teach college, write plays and found the West Coast Jewish Theatre which involves over three hundred celebrities from the motion picture, television and radio industries.