Culture-shocked wherever she goes

In THE heartland of America, an occasional billboard will announce, "This is God's country, please don't drive through it like hell." In "Have You No Shame? And Other Regrettable Stories," Rachel Shukert floors it through her childhood in Omaha, a place populated with churches of various flavors but not known for its overabundance of synagogues. Far from a white-bread memoir of growing up in Middle America, this is the tale of a Jewish angst-ridden teenager living in the land of Cheez Whiz, Twizzlers and Philistines.

Shukert starts off introducing us to a couple of favorite games she played as an 8-year-old in the 1980s, People Who Would Hide Us From the Nazis and What to Pack When Fleeing From the Nazis. Little Rachel is obsessed with books like "The Diary of Anne Frank" and "The Island on Bird Street," from which she learned "how to burrow under the ghetto wall, how to keep and shoot a gun, and that the only person you can really trust is your pet mouse." Her ready-to-go-at-a-moment's-notice packing list includes "Ziploc bags of Cheerios and Skittles, apple juice boxes, and cans of Diet Coke from the pantry." While she plays her games, her mother fashions American cheese slices into the shapes of menorahs, shofars and dreidels with her holiday cookie cutters.

I need to make a disclaimer here: My knowledge of Judaism ends at the deli counter. I did live in Oklahoma at one time, so I understand the American cheese hors d'oeuvres, but when, say, Yad Vashem is mentioned, I'm not so hip. It's apparent that Rachel is used to communicating with Midwestern shiksas like me and provides footnotes with a friendly "Hello Gentiles!" greeting. As she explains in the first note, "In the spirit of cross-cultural dialogue, this feature, denoted by the symbol of the cross instead of the customary asterisk, will hereafter appear when we deem a reference or joke sufficiently 'Jew-y' to require elucidation." She uses a similar footnote designation for non-Midwesterners (denoted by an N for "Great Moments in Nebraska History") to give insight to the casserole of local politics, folklore and other tidbits of history that provide the context of her memoir.