SHANDA

Of family secrets, roads not taken, private failings, and other incidents that induce shanda, the Yiddish word for shame.

Pogrebin, a prolific author and co-founder of Ms. magazine, begins this lively memoir with her four grandparents, who “produced a combined fourteen offspring, who, in turn, birthed twenty-five children, including me, a cast of characters with enough secrets to fill this book twice over.” Once is plenty, as the author’s family dammed up a flood of scandalous secrets that have kept her guessing for decades. The sense of shame that propels her stories is amplified by the idea that Jews are often expected to live “morally upright, socially useful, and professionally exemplary” lives, and its effects are far-reaching. When Bernie Madoff went to prison for fraud, destroying the financial lives of some 37,000 people, one son killed himself, another died of shanda-born lymphoma, another went to prison, and Madoff’s widow went into hiding and tried to kill herself. “I didn’t lose a penny with him, but I, too, felt his swindle to be a blight on the Jewish collective,” writes the author. Though not nearly as venal, Pogrebin’s family skeletons in the closet are real: She hid a brain tumor from old friend Alan Alda out of shame for being ill, for example, and a grandmother was a runaway bride, thus committing “the heinous sin of publicly shaming a man.” In addition, changes of name run throughout the generations to disguise Jewishness in a strange land, “which, I submit, proves that hiddenness, especially hiding one’s true identity, is associated with Jews in particular and explains why I think of shame and secrecy as quintessentially Jewish issues.” Pogrebin writes with sympathy and affection of these and other foibles, some more and some less serious, whether letting a son skip college to go to culinary school or confessing that she panicked when “one of my daughters almost married a Catholic.”

A wise, funny look behind the curtains of a family that, it would seem, has little to be ashamed of.