GREEN WORLD

How Shakespeare changed the author’s life.

The only child of Holocaust survivors, Ephraim grew up with a volatile, controlling father whose anger blighted her life. Both parents, deeply wounded, distrustful, and overly protective of their daughter, created an atmosphere of “encompassing gloom.” “I understood that my father said terrible things to me,” Ephraim writes in her engaging debut memoir, which was awarded the University of Massachusetts’ Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction. “I accepted that my mother held me responsible for her well-being and made no secret that I’d failed at the job. The way they treated me was often unbearable, and I spent every waking minute wanting to get away.” Escape came when she left for college; initially aspiring to become a poet, she decided instead to pursue a doctorate in literature and landed at the University of Wisconsin, where she discovered Shakespeare. Ephraim was drawn to the enigmatic characters of Shylock and his daughter, Jessica, in The Merchant of Venice. “Angry fathers, absent mothers, and defiant daughters are typical characters in Shakespeare plays,” writes Ephraim. “But these three are the only Jews Shakespeare ever wrote,” and they struck a chord of recognition. Like her own father, Shylock is “a lonely outsider forced to live in the Jewish ghetto. He takes out his anger and paranoia on his only child, a daughter.” Jessica, like Ephraim, struggled with the shame of wanting to leave her oppressive family. Ephraim immersed herself in research and worked tirelessly to meet the demands for tenure. On the rocky road to becoming a Shakespeare scholar, she discovered what literary critics call the “Green World”: a refuge in the woods for a character fleeing from a major problem at home. “In that Green World,” she writes, “romantic and familiar conflicts are resolved, and the troubled heroine finally finds some peace.”

A sensitive, deftly crafted memoir.