FELA'S STORY

In this memoir, a psychoanalyst tracks her family’s displacement, due to World War II, and tries to piece together her personal history.

The book begins in the 2000s, when Beren had to move her aging mother to a nursing home. The elderly woman had always been reluctant to share her memories, and the author describes how difficult it was to construct her own history when she was young: “I was caught between my mother’s desire not to look back, to begin a fresh life, and my father’s reticence towards his new country, his mourning of what had been lost.” Born in Russia at the end of the war, Beren moved to the United States with her parents when she was 9; with the help of an American relative living in Chicago, the family was able to leave the German displaced persons camp where they’d been living. The book collects stories of several family members, including the author’s mother, her father, her cousin Elizabeth, and other relatives who were either killed or uprooted by the war and its aftermath. The author’s father was from a small town in Poland, and her mother was from Russia. One of the mysteries that the book sets out to solve is the circumstance of their meeting and marriage. At one point, the author puts it bluntly: “I have no sense of their relationship.” As she gathers more material—recorded oral histories, old documents, her mother’s handwritten account—she slowly sketches a portrait of a European Jewish family.

The author writes with tremendous detail, turning her own memories and others’ into stirring scenes. In the book’s longest chapter, “Behind the Iron Curtain,” she writes about traveling to Gomel, Russia (now Belarus), in 1966 to meet her maternal grandparents, and she vividly captures the poignancy of the family reunion, a young person’s excitement abroad, and her unease regarding traveling between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Although the book somewhat haphazardly ricochets through time, this reflects the author’s effort to keep the many individual stories straight. The chapter divisions help to organize the narrative, but they don’t stop it from looping back on itself, reiterating snatches of stories and bits of family lore. At times, the sequence of events seems repetitive or hard to follow. Although the chapters set in two displaced persons camps aren’t riveting, they do clearly depict the author’s family trying to figure out where it belonged. Such questions persisted long after the family left Europe for Chicago, and the writer frankly states that she doesn’t really know where she’s from, even now. In prose marked by wit, elegance, and searching candor, her frustration becomes the guiding light of this book: “It is the frustration I’ve felt my entire life,” she writes, “in not having a coherent picture, call it a map, of my origins, of the place where I was born.” The book also includes family photos.

A cleareyed remembrance in which the author’s personal history is both a point of pride and a painful burden.