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While Experience is the Angled Road: Memoir of an Academic is about leadership, it is not a handbook on how to be a leader. R. Barbara Gitenstein’s narrative captures the shock and the humor she faced when confronting the obstacles of being the only “whatever” in the room (woman, Jew, southerner, liberal).
Her parents moved from New York City to a small town in Alabama, where Gitenstein was born and raised. While Southern etiquette prevented most citizens from overtly anti-Semitic slurs, she knew from a young age that she just did not fit. When she left for boarding school in the 8the grade, she discovered that it was more than being Jewish and a Yankee that made her an oddity. She was an intellectual; she loved classical music. She survived painful loss and life changing challenges. In a chapter focused on her mother’s impact on her life, Gitenstein writes of the final months of her mother’s fight with Alzheimer’s:
I stopped the wheelchair and took her face in both my hands. She had her usual vacant look. “Mom,” I said. “I’ve just published a book. It’s about literary criticism and I dedicated it to you.”
With unimaginable emotional strength from somewhere deep inside, my real mother pushed through the powerful downward pull of Alzheimer’s and in a voice, I thought I would never hear again, my mother said, “You could not have done anything that I would have appreciated more.”
Then the undertow overpowered her and she was gone again.
Before entering Academe, Gitenstein learned to lead from the periphery, benefitting from exceptional and surprising mentors.
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Praise
Ellen G. Friedman, Professor Emerita, The College of New Jersey,
"An intimate portrait of the journey to forge an extraordinary identity, R. Barbara Gitenstein’s Experience is the Angled Road depicts how a girl born into one of a very few Jewish families in a tiny Alabama town grew up to have a life filled with path-breaking accomplishments. Gitenstein became the first woman and first Jewish president of The College of New Jersey. The book moves like memory, with incidents accruing more meaning and detail with each repetition. Organized by chapters that focus on the most important people in Gitenstein’s life, this memoir triggers the reader’s own recollections, thus doubling its impact. It holds nothing back: painful rejections by lovers, hurtful estrangements from parents, betrayals by mentors, life-altering surgeries. But it also credits those who broke with the era’s practices to encourage a woman and a Jew to resist traditional restraints and express all that was in her to realize."
George A. Pruitt, President Emeritus, Thomas Edison State College
“Dr. Gitenstein has provided us with a compelling glimpse into the deeply personal, sometimes painful life of an accomplished public person. She shares with us a heartwarming love story along with her struggle for emancipation from a cocoon of external expectations to become one of higher education’s most respected college presidents. Vulnerable, candid and inspiring, Gitenstein vividly portrays her struggle for emancipation from a cocoon of external expectations as a Jewish woman coming of age in Florala, Alabama, with dynamic prose and storytelling that will keep you turning the page. The powerfully courageous and heartrending account of a young Jewish woman coming of age in Florala, Alabama to become one of higher education’s most respected college presidents. Vulnerable, candid and inspiring, Gitenstein vividly portrays her experience as a Jewish woman coming of age in Florala, Alabama with dynamic prose and illustrative storytelling that will keep you turning the page.
About the Author
Barbara Gitenstein is the author of some 30 academic articles on Jewish-American Literature and academic administration as well as the monograph Apocalyptic Messianism and Jewish-American Poetry. She has made over 100 presentations at literature and academic administrative conferences. She was often interviewed on radio and television stations in New Jersey, focusing on higher education issues. She did not grow up aspiring to be a president of a college, rather she wanted to be a prima donna at the Metropolitan Opera Company.
