WHEN SHE COMES BACK

A woman recalls her childhood after her mother left the family to become a follower of a controversial Indian guru in this debut memoir.

Plank was 6 years old when her mother decided to attend guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s now infamous ashram in Pune, India. In 1978, the author and her younger sister, Nava, were reunited with their estranged father at Newark Airport before their mother boarded a plane for the subcontinent. The book skips back in time to recount how Plank’s Jewish parents met while training to work on a kibbutz. The author was born in Israel and spent her early years on the kibbutz before her parents returned to the United States, where they struggled to adapt to the “maelstrom of tasks” in their new lives. Following her parents’ divorce, Plank’s mother yearned for freedom and headed for India, leaving her children to be raised by their father in Newark and, later, Queens. After returning to America, the author’s mother left the family again to attend Bhagwan’s Oregon ashram. Recounting her journey to reconciliation, Plank discusses her sense of abandonment and attempts to comprehend her mother’s decisions. Interest in Bhagwan has been reignited in recent years due to Netflix’s Wild Wild Country. Fans of the documentary series will glean little insider knowledge in these pages about what happened in Bhagwan’s ashrams, although in the final chapter, Plank recalls confronting her reticent mother with the statement: “But you know some people call him the Sex Guru.” Instead, this memoir focuses on how the shock waves of parental decisions resonate outward to impact families. The author expertly explains complex emotions, such as a sense of resilience when recognizing she was being pitied: “It felt like pity, like she saw something serious and sad about me and the way I was growing up. I didn’t have room to hold onto those kinds of feelings; I couldn’t afford them.” Plank is also fiercely straight-talking; when pondering the implausibility of Bhagwan’s rhetoric, she remarks: “I have to wonder where my mother’s bullshit detector had gone.” The result is a frank, sharply written memoir that explores childhood anguish—although it may not be the exposé that some readers may have hoped for.

An intimate, intuitive, emotionally vivid family account that finds hope in reconciliation.