A poignant and life-affirming family memoir.
A James Beard Award–winning food blogger’s account of growing up in a family with conflicting attitudes toward Judaism.
Though Jewish by culture, Altman’s (Poor Man's Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking, 2013) parents never pushed her to explore the religion. Her stylish mother scoffed at Talmudic teachings she believed were “designed for people living five thousand years before Pucci and Ella Fitzgerald.” But her advertising executive father, the son of an abusive “fire-and-brimstone Orthodox cantor,” had a far more complex relationship to Judaism. Though apparently uninterested in the Jewish religion, he still emanated a “primal yearning for spiritual connection.” Feeling left out of the rituals that marked the lives of her more devout friends, Altman decided that she wanted to attend Hebrew school, where she felt the first stirrings of lesbian desire for a beautiful teacher. Meanwhile, her parents’ difficult marriage foundered and failed. Her father returned temporarily to his mother’s apartment, the very place he had sought to escape as a young man. By contrast, the apartment became a haven for Altman, whose grandmother joyfully cooked meals for her there. Years later, when her own life fell apart, the author returned to her grandmother’s home, which her father told her was the place she would “bring my husband and raise my children.” While she cooked meals that healed her soul and brought her closer to her beloved grandmother, she finally learned to embrace her homosexuality. Eventually, she married a Catholic woman she loved with—to her surprise—her father’s approval. Like him, she was treyf—imperfect and rule-breaking—and in that commonality, the two finally bonded. In this richly textured narrative, Altman not only reveals how she learned to interweave the contradictory threads of her life into a complex whole. She also gives eloquent voice to the universal human desire to belong.
A poignant and life-affirming family memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-425-27781-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: New American Library
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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