Review Excerpt:

Alan Kaufman is a survivor. It took him nearly half a century to realize it.

As a kid, he believed ``there was no difference between a victim and a survivor,'' he writes in his frank and affecting memoir, ``Jew Boy.'' ``Only chance kept one alive, killed another.''

Such a bleak worldview was the product of his family's terrible secret. Kaufman's mother was a Holocaust survivor, and she passed her suffering down to her son in the form of psychic brutality and whippings with coat hangers.

The Bronx-born, late-blooming San Francisco poet and editor (of ``The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry'' and Davka, the short-lived but widely noted magazine of ``radical Jewish culture''), was delirious with shame over his heritage. ``I knew that more than anything in the world,'' he writes, ``I wanted not to be Jewish.''

``Jew Boy'' is the story of Kaufman's desperate attempts to escape his history through brawling, bloody contact sports, alcohol abuse and cross-country hitchhiking. Eventually, he escapes through writing, by returning to the source of his deepest hurt.

Kaufman's unique voice, by turns manic and wretched, is always intoxicated with language. It was formed on the teeming streets of New York in the early 1960s, not in the cafes and salons but in the subway stations, in the tenement halls and on the fire escapes, where young men with aching frustrations stumbled into the written word as an unlikely savior. It's a latter-day extension of the pulp literati, the Hubert Selbys and Jean Genets, improbably leavened with plenty of youthful naivete and whimsy.

Kaufman's editor, Fred Jordan, was once Barney Rosset's partner at the legendary Grove Press, where he edited Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller. Later he edited Art Spiegelman's graphic novel ``Maus.'' ``Jew Boy'' combines the core elements of each: Kerouac's wide-eyed discovery of an alternative America, Miller's resolve to throw open the doors of private lives, however unflattering, and Spiegelman's comic-book approach to the modern era's most horrific event.