Saturday Walk, and Other Stories, describes the author's coming of age as a Rabbi's daughter in Perth Amboy, New Jersey; while navigating the contradictions of secular and nonsecular life and struggling to develop an identity separate from her influential father. “i just finished reading Judith Chasek Davidson's tales of her life as a rabbi's daughter, and I loved it. As Judy's college roommate and friend, I knew her as brilliant, questing, open-hearted, and warm-hearted, and all those qualities shine through in these deeply caring and breathtakingly honest recollections of family relations, especially with her remarkable, intellectually challenging father. This probing account, seasoned with tart humor, follows her ....growth and self-understanding as a daughter, as a woman, as a Jew.” \—Judith Viorst From "The Hoopa Holder""...I participated in hundreds of home weddings as a child. Sometimes these were expected for weeks; sometimes we would be unexpectedly routed out of bed in the dead of night and would grope for the hoopa pole with eyes full of sleepers. ...The pre-wedding preparations would begin in the parlor before the guests arrived. The hoopa, disassembled and collapsed, would be pulled out from its place behind the filing cabinet in the parlor. Then Dorie and I would help my father put it all together,,,, Sometimes I suspected that this was the part of the wedding which my father, who loved gadgets, relished most....And there it would suddenly bloom in the middle of our plain, modest living room... an elegant, sumptuous hoopa of heavy maroon velvet, worthy of getting married under." From "Saturday Walk": “When I was a little girl in Perth Amboy, New Jersey the “Saturday Walk” was an institution, a special weekly ritual shared by my father and me. Saturday was “shabbos,” our day of rest, but it did not really begin for my father until noon, when he returned from his morning at the Temple… One day I found myself in high school; it was a new world, and this world revolved around the Saturday afternoon football game…. The bus trip was more than a means of getting to the game. It was a vital part of the whole ritual which culminated in victory or defeat and the bus trip homeward. Important things happened on that bus. Songs were sung. Cheers were cheered. Arrangements were made for obtaining players’ autographs during the intermission. In short, if there was one place a person had to be, it was seated on that bus Saturday afternoon, going to the game. Of course, riding on shabbos was unthinkable—I don’t believe the possibility ever crossed my mind. But to miss the game was also unthinkable. So every week I walked the six miles to the game, alone. And slowly, inexorably, I became an outcast.”