This volume recording one family’s history should strike a responsive chord among those caring for aged loved ones.
The six offspring of a Vermont couple celebrate their parents’ devotion to family, religion, and a rigorous work ethic in this debut memoir.
When Jeannette and Bob Clavelle died two years apart after a marriage of more than 60 years, they had little of monetary value to pass on to their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. But they left behind a rich legacy of love, honor, and strong family ties. Both parents—who were Roman Catholics—were descended from French Canadians who immigrated to Winooski, Vermont, in the early quarter of the 20th century. The American Woolen Mill provided jobs and security for the working class, and Winooski became a bilingual, French Canadian enclave. The siblings grew up surrounded by two sets of loving grandparents and within the arms of a tight community. Bob, who co-owned a grocery store, was an outgoing charmer. He was never wealthy but always generous. He also had a serious problem with alcohol for a good part of his adult life. The bulk of the narrative focuses on Bob and Jeannette’s later years, after retirement, when they began to endure the vagaries of old age. There are many trips to the hospital, the rehab center, and finally the nursing home. Although the workmanlike account is weighed down with details of illnesses, there are some touching passages that involve Bob tirelessly caring for Jeannette at home. The authors also pepper the memoir with some lighthearted anecdotes, such as Bob’s struggles with a computer his kids bought to keep him connected with “modern” life. He complained that his email wouldn’t work after he “set up” his passwords: “When I try to type them in, all I get is a string of asterisks.” The most heart-rending sections—and yet in some ways the most helpful to those who are dealing with aging family members—present the elaborate details of trying to ensure the well-being of parents who have been fiercely independent throughout their lives and now need the help of others.
This volume recording one family’s history should strike a responsive chord among those caring for aged loved ones.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4834-5835-9
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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