Dr. Mimi Zieman was 25 and in her third year of medical school when she made a courageous but unexpected decision: She would join four climbers as they attempted a new route up the rarely traversed East Face of Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world above sea level. The ascent would be without sherpas, guides or supplemental oxygen to deal with the thinning air at extreme altitudes. She would be the only woman and the only medical support on the ascent.

That was in 1988, and Tap Dancing on Everest—part memoir, part introspective travelogue and part coming-of-age story—describes Dr. Zieman’s time on Everest as well as the series of choices that brought her there; her childhood obsession with tap dancing and her experiences as a young woman traveling the Annapurna Circuit, a long-distance trek in the Annapurna mountain range in Nepal. The book also explores how her Jewish identity, shaped by a father who survived the Holocaust and an Israeli mother who immigrated to the United States, provided her with the stamina and spirituality to overcome the mental and physical challenges of the Everest expedition.

It is, however, the author’s candid and descriptive language that grips the reader. Dr. Zieman lays bare her private thoughts and spiritual musings, sharing experiences that frequently shift between danger and excitement and between profound natural beauty and incredible physical discomforts.

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One Book, One Hadassah virtual event!

Join us on Thursday, December 19 at 7 PM ET as author and women’s health advocate Dr. Mimi Zieman discusses her engaging memoir, Tap Dancing on Everest, with Hadassah Magazine Executive Editor Lisa Hostein.

As a young medical student, Dr. Zieman became the medical expert—and the only woman— on a team scaling Mount Everest. In this coming-of-age story, she blends memories of the risky expedition with reflections on her Jewish background and her meditations on risk, adventure and empowerment.

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The book begins with half of her Everest expedition searching the frozen landscape for any sign that the other members of their group—missing for nine days—have survived.  “We’d last spotted the climbers days earlier, tiny dots ascending toward the summit, creeping over the edge of our route to the South Col, the link between Tibet and Nepal, East and South, visible and invisible,” Dr. Zieman writes. “We distinguished them by the color of their coats and hats, steadily inching up in the bright sunshine. Now there was no sun, just lackluster white, and our world of waiting felt like groping through the darkness, except that everything was flat and stark and still.”

Dr. Zieman had prepared for the journey, training herself to treat a range of ailments as well as bringing weather-sustaining clothing and gear. But nothing could prepare her for the reality of the frigid temperatures, which hovered around -20°. The veteran climbers accompanying her became friends and patients. She treated them for digestive issues, altitude sickness and frostbite, and she danced and drank with them, even developing an intimate relationship with a fellow climber.

Dr. Zieman leaves the fate of the missing climbers to the final pages of the book, but the journey through her story until that ending is fascinating.

Growing up in Manhattan, Dr. Zieman was negatively impacted by her parents’ disintegrating marriage, absorbing the sense that she was never good enough. Don’t depend on anyone else, her mother told her, a message that left her feeling isolated and unprepared to connect deeply with others.

A counterbalance to that negative messaging was the positive reinforcement she received about her Jewish identity. She fondly recalls the pike, carp and whitefish her parents purchased for Passover, with their “mouthwatering scent of sea,” emerging from brown butcher paper to later become “oval-shaped patties” of gefilte fish. She remembers how her father “loved to sit like a king” at the head of the seder table, leading the songs and stories. She reflects on her “promise to return promptly” after her first transformative visit to Israel as a teenager and the way Hebrew, “the language of Jewish prayer [with its] square sounds…emphatic consonants and sharp corners” seeped through her being—shaping the movement of her mouth, the roll of her tongue, even her “tilt of chin.”

Yet, Tap Dancing on Everest, is as much a feminist tale of self-discovery as a Jewish story. It’s about “finding one’s voice and learning to trust it,” she writes, and “coming to terms with one’s body,”  despite thinking it awkward, “too large, and full of shame.”

Today, Dr. Zieman is a women’s health advocate and ob/gyn living in Atlanta, married with three children. Whether she will return to Mount Everest for another ascent is a decision still up in the air.

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Stewart Kampel was a former editor at The New York Times.