Climbing and Cliffhangers
Tap Dancing on Everest (Globe Pequot, $22.95) by Mimi Zieman begins with a literal cliffhanger, as she awaits the return of a climbing team from Mount Everest’s treacherous East Face in Tibet. It is 1988 and Zieman, a 25-year-old medical student, is stationed at an advanced base camp to support the first team ever to scale this side of the mountain without using oxygen or Sherpa support. Three climbers are missing, and Zieman is right to be concerned about their safety. The East Face is known for avalanches and, as she says, “Picking out a new route, rare on Everest, required the mental nimbleness of a chess master, the physicality of an Olympian, and the fearlessness of an astronaut.” She doesn’t know if the climbers will perish or return, or if her medical training will be adequate to help them survive should they reappear.
This opening invites readers on a gripping journey, gorgeously weaving her family history, medicine, and adventure in a feminist story of self-discovery.
How did Zieman find herself in this precarious situation? We are introduced to her parents, immigrants who arrived by ship, and the influence they had on her childhood in New York City. Her father is a Holocaust survivor whose immediate family was killed by the Nazis. Her mother’s family, also displaced by the war, fled Germany, and lived in Israel before settling in New York. Strong, yet shaped by their experiences, they are fearful for their daughter, and at times confront her with admonishments of “who do you think you are?” Despite this, Zieman perseveres, and we witness her spread her wings and learn to navigate 1970s Manhattan alone. An experience with a gynecologist as an adolescent inspires her to become a doctor who will provide better healthcare to women than she received.
After an inspiring summer working on a kibbutz at sixteen, Zieman commits to travel to learn about the world and other languages. She acknowledges that this too is the influence of her ancestors who had the strength to do the same, careful to add they didn’t have the same choices she has. “Perhaps part of my birthright was to wander,” Zieman muses as she escapes the city in favor of summers in Colorado and a solo backpacking trip to Nepal at twenty-two.
As a writer, she masterfully employs sensory details to describe the world around her through her treks and interactions with nature, while sharing her interior experience and reflections in lyrical and sometimes poetic writing. Recounting the freedom she discovered on family vacations in the Catskills as a youth, she writes, “In these moments, I was not clenched keys and a knotted stomach or cowering under covers; I was beaded necklaces, knotted macrame, and climbing a fort in a treetop so high my hair rustled in the leaves.” Describing Everest’s glacier while fearing the climbers dead, her description of the environment parallels her feeling of dread: “The unearthed glacial detritus smelled of decay, the brackish water layered with notes of algae like musky wine.”
As interesting as her adventures is the tension that lies between Zieman’s obligations to her family and her desire to experience more of the world. She resolves this by finding opportunities to celebrate her heritage. After reaching Everest Base Camp, she spots the full moon and prepares a makeshift Passover seder for her teammates. “The more solo wandering I did, the more connected I became. To my roots, to myself, to others.”
After Zieman left Everest, she fulfilled her dream of becoming an obstetrician/ gynecologist. She is an activist for reproductive rights, and wrote a screenplay, “The Post-Roe Monologues,” inspired by the stories of lives affected by the Dobbs Supreme Court ruling, and she has co-written multiple books on managing contraception.
Tap Dancing on Everest captures Zieman’s journey to move beyond the walls of her fear both to create a world for herself and to create a safer world for others. I connected to this unique story of a brave Jewish woman at a time when it feels challenging to be both. Her willingness to push her body and face harsh conditions is far removed from something I would attempt myself; reading her story emboldened me to defy my own self-imposed limitations, to step beyond my own walls.
Sarah Leibov is a writer and Feldenkrais practitioner in suburban Chicago.
