REVIEW: Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor’s Unlikely Adventure by Mimi Zieman

by Melissa Greenwood

“I’m not really into adventure stories,” one memoir-loving friend bristled when I recommended Mimi Zieman’s Tap Dancing on Everest (Falcon; April 2024) to her — a story, as the subtitle suggests, about “a young doctor’s unlikely adventure” volunteering (in the late ‘80s) as the team physician for a gutsy, unaided Everest expedition before she’s even graduated from medical school.

At first, I was startled by my friend’s reaction. Is she really knocking my suggestion? Doesn’t she know I have impeccable taste? Then again, I scarcely read fiction because real-life stories like Zieman’s are far more compelling to me — a fact that some people might find as surprising as I found my friend’s apathy.

I briefly considered buying and force-feeding the book to her but ultimately decided to change my friend’s closed mind not by coercion or voodoo, nor by Jewish guilt, trickery, or shame, but by writing this review — which, by now, felt like a personal call to action.

Like the company I keep, I’m not the most likely candidate to pick up and love a so-called “adventure story” either. Despite my day job as a Pilates teacher, not only do I have close to zero non-Pilates-related athletic abilities or fascination with sports — extreme, gravity-defying, or otherwise — but I also have very little interest in armchair adventuring or even personally communing with nature. I hesitate to advertise my allergy to the outdoors because people tend to take it about as well as they’d take someone’s hatred of puppies. (For the record, I think puppies are adorable!) But it is true that a dentist once broke up with me for not being “outdoorsy enough” when I was 25 — narrator Mimi’s age at the start of the book when we’re dropped right into the tensest moment on the mountain, left unresolved, before we go back in time to get the necessary backstory of the childhood and young adult life that ultimately leads Zieman here: to “the knife-edge” of a cliff and her limitations.

While the memoir is pitched as an adventure story, partially because Zieman’s publisher Falcon Press is the world’s leading publisher of outdoor recreation content, it is so much more than that, and Zieman — whose book talks I’ve attended live and on Zoom — agrees. It’s a “finding one’s “own voice and learn[ing] to trust it” coming-of-age story; it’s a physician’s story; it’s a child-of-immigrants story; it’s a coming-to-terms-with-one’s (“awkward…too large, and full of shame”) body through movement story; and it’s a woman’s story, among others.

There isn’t so much as a whisper of thrill-seeking when Zieman writes about her fractured family, or excelling in school, or the stigma of labels like “scholarship kid,” or her love of language, or a “fear of fat” that leads to “restricted,” disordered eating, or her close-knit relationship with her maternal grandmother: the strong female archetype embodied, or challenging her parents’ practices, as she tries on a more observant religious approach. It’s no surprise that I felt seen in all these instances that mirror my own experience, just as I did when Zieman describes the “grounded…capable and strong” feeling of “pushing [her] body to extremes.” While I’ve honed my mind-body connection and something like grace through Pilates, Zieman finds the same confidence and power she earlier found dancing when later training and eventually trekking.

But what drew me in more than the above commonalities was the Jewish story behind this “woman’s story.” Every Jewish nod — both heavy and light — felt like home to me: the way the metal snaps of her beloved grandma Amama’s housecoat cool her skin whenever Zieman snuggles in her familiar lap; the pungent Passover-evoking smell of pike, carp, and whitefish emerging from brown butcher paper to later become the (polarizing) “oval-shaped patties” known as gefiltefish with their “mouthwatering scent of sea;” the way her dad “love[s] to sit like a king” at the head of the seder table, “leading songs and stories;” how she “promise[s] to return promptly” after her first transformative visit to the Holy Land as a teen; and how Hebrew, “the language of Jewish prayer, [with its] square sounds…emphatic consonants and sharp corners, seep[s] through [her] skin…chang[ing] the shape of her mouth, the roll of [her] tongue, the feel of breath in the back of the throat…[and] the tilt of [her] chin.”

I even felt a pinprick of recognition when the narrator acknowledges absorbing some of her “alive if not accessible,” Holocaust-surviving father’s “legacy of pain.” While I am not the child or even grandchild of survivors and have therefore been spared the intergenerational trauma about which Zieman writes, I do know what it’s like to feel the pain of my people in my bones. I felt it when I visited Auschwitz 18 years ago — like their choking was my choking — and I’ve felt it every day since last year’s deadliest post-Holocaust attack on Jews — like I’ve been mourning the loss of family members.

But I don’t have to be personally bereaved for Jewish deaths to feel personal, and you don’t have to share our faith to appreciate this memoir. In fact, the author never set out to write a Jewish book but a universal one, and (as is her custom) she succeeds. A triumph at the sentence level with its slap-you-in-the-face-awake phrases, Tap Dancing on Everest stuns — and Zieman’s lyrical voice shines — from the “slanted pink of morning” to the “hush of dusk” to the “strange warmth of thick darkness.” And this is true whether she’s remembering the “gray diaspora of clouds” over freezing “teal lakes,” detailing the “yawn of outstretched morning,” or praying to “the lifting veil…[of] inky black night” as though it could be her last.

Not a nature lover? No problem. You don’t have to be any one way or have a penchant for any single activity to find yourself reflected in these pages. Not really into adventure narratives or thrill-seeking? That’s okay; something else will resonate with you, as it has for my friend, who’s since ordered the book of her own volition and delighted at the surprising word choices and startling images. I suspect you’ll be spellbound by Zieman’s breathtaking, poetry-like prose too. Or you’ll find a different takeaway. Whatever your identity — climber, doctor, dancer, writer, Jew — come as you are, with a reverence for story and an unquenchable curiosity, and leave with a deeper understanding of what it means to be human: “fragmented and whole” and electrically alive for as long as the mountain will hold you.