Will haunt readers for days.
Heartbreaking, hard-boiled memoir of the author’s late father, a liar and criminal she loved deeply.
Vogel’s masterful account of their fraught relationship begins with her father’s 1995 funeral, a poor affair in Minneapolis following a police chase that ended with John Vogel shooting himself. He had left Jennifer, her mother, and siblings years earlier in order to pursue his own mercurial path. She grew up poor in Minnesota and Iowa, moving from place to place, often just ahead of the bill collector, wondering where John was. Over the years, he ran a real-estate company, opened a burger joint, probably committed arson, almost murdered somebody for money, robbed banks, and printed nearly 20 million counterfeit dollars. But he could always show up at Jennifer’s doorstep with a smile and a gift and win everybody over with his improbable charm. Behind the smile was the desperation of a man who wanted nothing more than a normal family and a normal life but couldn’t manage the strains of such an existence. So John contented himself by living in the margins, always making the surprise visit, and never fulfilling promises. “Sometimes he tried too hard. Faint panic lurked behind these gay efforts as Dad weighed each individual moment to determine whether he’d won us or lost us.” Jennifer bounced from her mother’s house to living with her father in Seattle to bumming around with West Coast hippies. She then returned to Minnesota, where she ended up as an investigative reporter at City Pages, the Minneapolis alternative weekly. It was a good job for her, providing a useful outlet for the suspicion of cops and all authority bred in her hardscrabble family. Vogel’s memoir benefits from her hard-nosed prose. This account, which could have been limp with sentimentality, skirts the easy route and presents a clear, though hardly unemotional, view of a damaged, complicated man and the loyal, angry, loving daughter he left behind.
Will haunt readers for days.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-1707-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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
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