…J.D. Salinger, author of Cather in the Rye, also wrote Franny and Zooey in which Franny, a young woman, finds herself in a spiritual crisis and falls in love with a book about a religious pilgrim who has a prayer that he constantly repeats until it matches the beating of his heart.

Salinger thought he was a Jew until he discovered in his teens that his mother was not and it precipitated a major identity crisis. Salinger grew up in several different apartments on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. At one point, home was a couple of blocks from the future site of the ultimate in non-Jewish Jewish delicatessens, Zabar’s…