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THE TELL

A MEMOIR

A touching, angry, humorous, and engaging account of a turbulent life.

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A debut memoir excavates the secrets and multigenerational dysfunctions of a family.

Meyers’ life did not begin auspiciously. Conceived to keep her father, Gerry, out of World War II, she became less consequential when he was given 4-F status a few months before her arrival. Gerry and Tessie, children of Eastern European immigrants, were raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn when the area was essentially a Jewish ghetto. Their marriage was at best tumultuous, and Meyers spent her childhood navigating the space between her warring parents. Gerry was a womanizer who played on the edges of the Jewish mob. As a teenager, he was a leader in the Amboy Dukes, a feeder gang for Murder Inc., although there is no indication that he joined the “corporation.” Tessie was emotionally fragile and attempted suicide several times (finally succeeding in 1970). In 1957, the teenage Meyers spent the summer at a Catskills bungalow colony, where her grandmother worked a small concession. There the author met Ralph Lifshitz and fell passionately in love. Unfortunately, the relationship ended before it really began, and in 1961, desperate to move away from home, she married her buddy Howard. Twelve years and three sons later, they divorced. Meyers went on to college and a new marriage; she is currently a psychologist and psychoanalyst. The complex narrative, a series of long, evocative essays, often moves back and forth in time, as one experience or another is related to a memory from the past. This produces some repetition. But edgy, masterful prose, sprinkled with the Yiddish expressions of Meyers’ youth, gradually peels away the layers of hurt, confusion, and guilt—and includes a few surprises (for example, Ralph’s current identity). Of her grandparents’ marriage, she writes: “Eva, unlike Harry, was unable to protest. She packed her dreams in her suitcase, walked down the aisle and took the oath of servitude.” The author’s descriptions of 1940s Brooklyn, where she spent time with her grandmother, paint a sharp period portrait: “The butcher shop had sawdust on the floor, a finger on the scale, and Esther, the chicken plucker, in the corner.”

A touching, angry, humorous, and engaging account of a turbulent life.

Pub Date: June 5, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-63152-355-7

Page Count: 234

Publisher: She Writes Press

Review Posted Online: May 1, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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