A JOYFUL NOISE

Art critic and novelist Weisgall (Still Point, 1990), whose father and grandfather were distinguished Czech-Jewish composers, writes a sentimental memoir of her upbringing in an emotionally overcharged artistic family. Ideals of music drive the memoir. Weisgall descends from generations of composers of synagogue music. Her father, Hugo, marked a turn toward the secular in the operas he wrote (Six Characters in Search of an Author, among others) but for years led the choir at the Baltimore synagogue where his own father, Adolph (“Abba”), was cantor, and where the family’s liturgical melodies dominated. The memoir opens with a precocious Deborah at Passover service and closes as Deborah, now grown, tours ancestral Prague, the city that symbolizes her parents’ lost world of high culture and art. Music is Abba’s dignity, and Hugo’s solace in his tempestuous marriage. In the shape of the family’s liturgical compositions, it represents as well Deborah’s goal to “claim the songs of her fathers” by singing them as part of a synagogue choir, a hope she realizes—against Judaism’s traditional bias toward male service leaders—in the book’s epilogue. Unfortunately, Weisgall has not achieved enough distance from her earlier self to represent it critically, a condition of autobiography that wins a reader’s sympathy. The tone of the author’s adolescent self-assessment—“I had never thought of myself as anything but perfect”—never quite yields to a more mature voice. This shows up most glaringly in her account of a Yom Kippur service she attended away from home: her histrionic reaction to the Reform liturgy practiced there (“awful and ugly”) wants critique. Instead, Weisgall turns the remembered reaction uncritically toward sentimental affirmation of her family’s own musical traditions. The decision for sentiment cuts off any larger reflection the memoir might have inspired on, say, the relation between Judaism and secular or even Christian art (which her family holds in high esteem). A missed opportunity for critical self-reflection.