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THE BABY BOAT

A MEMOIR OF ADOPTION

An anxious memoir of an older Manhattan couple’s experience of adopting a Lithuanian child. Novelist Dann (Mermaid, 1986) pens a painfully self-conscious but often insightful record of how she became a mother in middle age. There are, however, some curious omissions. While Dann confides in us things we didn’t have to know (like how it feels to be making love when your son is calling you), she doesn—t explain the genesis of the decision to adopt a child from Lithuania, where the stork is the national bird but where the bureaucracy and residency requirements are nightmarish. An infant female promised to Dann and her husband dies before they can get to the Baltics to meet her. Undeterred, the couple keep trying. The process doesn—t get easier: There are many more months of delays, foul-ups, and frustrations. Finally, they tackle the dilapidated justice system in Vilnius itself, and the bureaucratic wheels begin to move. Their second chance at parenthood, however, is nearly lost when the year-old boy they want to adopt gets ill and is confined in a frighteningly backward hospital. In decrepit and chaotic Lithuania, Dann’s husband, the calm, athletic, and resourceful Willem, proves adept at tracking down scarce medicine, baby food, and diapers. When grilled about their feelings for the child, Willem impresses a tough Lithuanian judge by saying, “I fell in love with my wife in one day as well.— Even in the final pages, with her bundle of joy in hand, the author remains a bundle of nerves. But while Dann is probably too anxious to be an entirely appealing character, she is a frank and droll one, noting at one point, that “I’ve lived my life as if I was taking pictures with no film in the camera.” While this is a far from objective look at the perils and problems of adopting infants abroad, it is a moving and often startlingly honest personal record.

Pub Date: May 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-7868-6380-3

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Hyperion

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998

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THE ESCAPE ARTIST

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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AN INVISIBLE THREAD

THE TRUE STORY OF AN 11-YEAR-OLD PANHANDLER, A BUSY SALES EXECUTIVE, AND AN UNLIKELY MEETING WITH DESTINY

A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York.

When advertising executive Schroff answered a child’s request for spare change by inviting him for lunch, she did not expect the encounter to grow into a friendship that would endure into his adulthood. The author recounts how she and Maurice, a promising boy from a drug-addicted family, learned to trust each other. Schroff acknowledges risks—including the possibility of her actions being misconstrued and the tension of crossing socio-economic divides—but does not dwell on the complexities of homelessness or the philosophical problems of altruism. She does not question whether public recognition is beneficial, or whether it is sufficient for the recipient to realize the extent of what has been done. With the assistance of People human-interest writer Tresniowski (Tiger Virtues, 2005, etc.), Schroff adheres to a personal narrative that traces her troubled relationship with her father, her meetings with Maurice and his background, all while avoiding direct parallels, noting that their childhoods differed in severity even if they shared similar emotional voids. With feel-good dramatizations, the story seldom transcends the message that reaching out makes a difference. It is framed in simple terms, from attributing the first meeting to “two people with complicated pasts and fragile dreams” that were “somehow meant to be friends” to the conclusion that love is a driving force. Admirably, Schroff notes that she did not seek a role as a “substitute parent,” and she does not judge Maurice’s mother for her lifestyle. That both main figures experience a few setbacks yet eventually survive is never in question; the story fittingly concludes with an epilogue by Maurice. For readers seeking an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter.

 

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-4516-4251-3

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011

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