How do you hit rock bottom by age fifteen? Start with psychoanalysis at age four. Increase dosage until saturation is reached. Add addiction. A pinch of A.D.D., arrest, violence, rehab, antidepressants, gangs, guns. Shake, stir, pour.

When he was a young boy, Moshe Kasher's mother took him on a vacation to the West Coast. Well, it was more like an abduction. She stole him and his brother away from their father and the Chassidic community they were being swept into and moved them to Oakland, California. That's where the real fun began, in the war zone of Oakland public schools. One of very few white students in every class he was in, Moshe took the only logical next step-he became black. Well, sort of. Gangster rap became the codex by which he lived his life. X-rated raps taught him how to live.

Of course most parents wouldn't have allowed a young boy to listen to music like that but, lucky boy, his couldn't hear it. Oh yeah, both of his parents were deaf. He might as well have been listening to Brahms. At age twelve he started using drugs and his trip down the rabbit hole gained speed and destructive momentum. Moshe was institutionalized at thirteen and sent straight to his first rehab upon release. By the time he was just fifteen, he'd dropped out of junior high school, bounced in and out of three rehabs, and was speeding toward the bottom. But, KASHER IN THE RYE is no "eye opener" to the horrors of addiction. This isn't an after-school special.

Brutally honest and laugh-out-loud funny, Moshe's first literary endeavor finds humor in even the most horrifying situations. Moshe joked his way down the ladder-but soon enough, he fell to the bottom. KASHER IN THE RYE is a snapshot of a childhood gone terribly wrong. This is the story of a young boy barely holding himself together while the world threatened to break him in two. It's a hilarious and painful ode to the agony and absurdity of a life that almost ended before it began. Brutally honest and laugh-out-loud funny, Kasher's first literary endeavor finds humor in even the most horrifying situations.