TASHA

A son’s search for his mother.

In 1991, award-winning novelist Morton fictionalized his mother in his first novel, The Dylanist. "Her eccentricities, he admits, “made it hard for me to resist a comic portrayal”—a portrayal that wounded her. Now, after her death, Morton tries to understand how she became the stubborn, overbearing woman who blighted his emotional life. When she was younger, he knew, she had been defiant and determined; at 16, she left home and changed her name from Esther to Tasha, “partly because she liked the sound and partly because it wasn’t the name of anyone she knew.” Tasha became the first copy girl at the Daily Worker, and she also worked for the United Office and Professional Workers of America, where she met the man she would marry. When he dallied in proposing, she took off to a kibbutz for six months. Married at last and with two young children, she returned to school to earn a graduate degree in education, going on to become an innovative teacher and active school board member. Yet after her husband died suddenly in 1984, she started hoarding—filling her house with the “detritus of her despair”—and sank into depression, the depths of which she confessed to her diary. She felt, Morton realized, “as if she loved us more than any of us loved her.” After a stroke and increasing dementia made it impossible for her to care for herself at home, Morton and his sister tried to find support for her only to discover the dearth of resources for the elderly and their vulnerability to abuse. The author’s revised portrayal of Tasha is both comic and tender. He recounts frustrating, absurd conversations and discovers, as well, “a life that was devoted to making a contribution. What I see is the life of a woman who gave of herself as fully as she could.” His affecting memoir reveals a desperate woman railing against indignities and loneliness and a son powerless to assuage her pain.

Melancholy and familial devotion imbue a nuanced, poignant portrait.