NINE LIVES

Kahane chronicles a life full of transformations during the mid-to-late 20th century in this memoir.

In 1935, the author was born in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland (“They were a tumultuous pair, my father and mother”). Per Kahane, their life traumas became ingrained in her psyche, resulting in a constant tug of war between being a stereotypical good daughter and pursuing the unconventional life she desired. Attending City College of New York, she met her lifelong friend and travel companion, Val; after graduating, they vagabonded through Europe, where she began the first of a series of fraught relationships with men. By 1966, her progress toward a doctorate degree at the University of California, Berkeley was at a standstill, and she realized that she “could no longer ignore the fact that [she] was inevitably drawn to men who needed [her] or something [she] represented.” The author began “the intimidating process of self-discovery” through analysis. Gaining insights from consciousness-raising groups popularized by second-wave feminism, Kahane “began to take [her]self more seriously as a scholar who was not just playing but working toward a serious profession.” In 1973, the author began her distinguished 24-year career as a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Buffalo also provided a fruitful personal relationship with Rainer Hauser, a professor of German literature; they married and had a son in 1976. After retiring, the author returned to Berkeley full time, trained to become a psychoanalyst at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, and embarked on a new romance. Tracking her life from the Great Depression and World War II through the aftermath of the Holocaust, the 1950s and 1960s in New York City and the Bay Area, the anti-war and free speech movements, and the rise of feminism, Kahane’s compelling writing illuminates life during the turbulent 20th century from a female perspective often missing from history. The extensive descriptions of travel, varying from free-spirited, low-budget adventures through Europe, North Africa, and North America to professional conferences in Poland and China, are likewise fascinating.

An engaging memoir of life lived to its fullest.