A moving and engaging reminder that our stories define us.
Short, lyrical segments record the author’s attempts to discover her family’s history after the death of her father.
Children’s author Scruggs (Jump, Rope, Magic, 2000; Journalism/Ohio Wesleyan Univ.) was 15 when her father died in 1980 of lung cancer. She had lost not only a beloved parent but also a priceless resource, she writes: “His death left me without his voice, his words, without the story of his life.” In an investigation that led from relative to relative, from archive to archive, Scruggs attempted to recover the names and stories of people whose lives were shrouded in the wordless history of slavery and Reconstruction. The author grew up in Nashville, and we hear some about her childhood and her education. (She doesn’t exactly come across as modest as she declares herself a “certified genius” and writes about her superior record as a student.) After a B.A. from Chicago and a Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics from Brown, she decided an academic life was not for her and segued into journalism, where she has remained. At first in desultory fashion and then more systematically, Scruggs began interviewing family members and examining 19th-century property records, where she found the names of her ancestors. Soon, she was even consulting supernatural sources, interpreting dreams and consulting with experts in Nigerian deities and in the Spiritual Baptist movement. She found evidence of some extramarital hanky-panky a generation or so back and discovered the interracial nature of her history, meeting the white family whose ancestors once owned hers and gave it the Scruggs name. At the close, she realizes that all names, including her own, will eventually disappear into the fog of time. Divided into 20 chapters and 2 epilogues, her brief narrative is mostly non-linear, structured by emotion and memory rather than time; readers must relax and float on the subtle currents of her prose.
A moving and engaging reminder that our stories define us.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26135-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.
When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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