A cleareyed remembrance in which the author’s personal history is both a point of pride and a painful burden.
In this memoir, a psychoanalyst tracks her family’s displacement, due to World War II, and tries to piece together her personal history.
The book begins in the 2000s, when Beren had to move her aging mother to a nursing home. The elderly woman had always been reluctant to share her memories, and the author describes how difficult it was to construct her own history when she was young: “I was caught between my mother’s desire not to look back, to begin a fresh life, and my father’s reticence towards his new country, his mourning of what had been lost.” Born in Russia at the end of the war, Beren moved to the United States with her parents when she was 9; with the help of an American relative living in Chicago, the family was able to leave the German displaced persons camp where they’d been living. The book collects stories of several family members, including the author’s mother, her father, her cousin Elizabeth, and other relatives who were either killed or uprooted by the war and its aftermath. The author’s father was from a small town in Poland, and her mother was from Russia. One of the mysteries that the book sets out to solve is the circumstance of their meeting and marriage. At one point, the author puts it bluntly: “I have no sense of their relationship.” As she gathers more material—recorded oral histories, old documents, her mother’s handwritten account—she slowly sketches a portrait of a European Jewish family.
The author writes with tremendous detail, turning her own memories and others’ into stirring scenes. In the book’s longest chapter, “Behind the Iron Curtain,” she writes about traveling to Gomel, Russia (now Belarus), in 1966 to meet her maternal grandparents, and she vividly captures the poignancy of the family reunion, a young person’s excitement abroad, and her unease regarding traveling between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Although the book somewhat haphazardly ricochets through time, this reflects the author’s effort to keep the many individual stories straight. The chapter divisions help to organize the narrative, but they don’t stop it from looping back on itself, reiterating snatches of stories and bits of family lore. At times, the sequence of events seems repetitive or hard to follow. Although the chapters set in two displaced persons camps aren’t riveting, they do clearly depict the author’s family trying to figure out where it belonged. Such questions persisted long after the family left Europe for Chicago, and the writer frankly states that she doesn’t really know where she’s from, even now. In prose marked by wit, elegance, and searching candor, her frustration becomes the guiding light of this book: “It is the frustration I’ve felt my entire life,” she writes, “in not having a coherent picture, call it a map, of my origins, of the place where I was born.” The book also includes family photos.
A cleareyed remembrance in which the author’s personal history is both a point of pride and a painful burden.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-949093-42-1
Page Count: 220
Publisher: IPBooks
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A powerful melding of image and text inspired by Instagram yet original in its execution.
Smith returns with a photo-heavy book of days, celebrating births, deaths, and the quotidian, all anchored by her distinctive style.
In 2018, the musician and National Book Award–winning author began posting on Instagram, and the account quickly took off. Inspired by the captioned photo format, this book provides an image for every day of the year and descriptions that are by turns intimate, humorous, and insightful, and each bit of text adds human depth to the image. Smith, who writes and takes pictures every day, is clearly comfortable with the social media platform—which “has served as a way to share old and new discoveries, celebrate birthdays, remember the departed, and salute our youth”—and the material translates well to the page. The book, which is both visually impactful and lyrically moving, uses Instagram as a point of departure, but it goes well beyond to plumb Smith’s extensive archives. The deeply personal collection of photos includes old Polaroid images, recent cellphone snapshots, and much-thumbed film prints, spanning across decades to bring readers from the counterculture movement of the 1960s to the present. Many pages are taken up with the graves and birthdays of writers and artists, many of whom the author knew personally. We also meet her cat, “Cairo, my Abyssinian. A sweet little thing the color of the pyramids, with a loyal and peaceful disposition.” Part calendar, part memoir, and part cultural record, the book serves as a rich exploration of the author’s fascinating mind. “Offered in gratitude, as a place to be heartened, even in the basest of times,” it reminds us that “each day is precious, for we are yet breathing, moved by the way light falls on a high branch, or a morning worktable, or the sculpted headstone of a beloved poet.”
A powerful melding of image and text inspired by Instagram yet original in its execution.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-44854-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
A fine turn to nonfiction by a superbly accomplished storyteller.
Acclaimed Canadian novelist Toews delivers a sometimes wrenching but often funny memoir.
Does it mean something, Toews wonders, that she dreamed that Mel Gibson ran off with her cell phone just before “someone shot me at close range, in the face”? Perhaps, for, as she reveals in the next breath, she once considered throwing herself into a swift-flowing river, contenting herself in the end by simply throwing her phone into the water instead. Touching on therapy, suicide, family, betrayal, and a dozen other themes, Toews’ narrative—epistolary at turns, poetic at others, always keenly observant—hinges on a recurrent question about the meaning of writing when silence is also a possibility, a question inspired by a writing colloquium whose judges rejected her because, they complained, she responded to the question “Why do I write?” with something more along the lines of “Why am I a writer?” (“Douchebag question either way,” she grumbles; “douchebag” is an oft-repeated word, as when she ventures editorial self-advice: “Let’s set out the douchebag moments in the text and eliminate them.”) It’s not her only writerly disappointment, but for every dark moment there’s a countervailing quip: “I think I’m nuts. I honestly think I need a psychiatrist….Or maybe I just need to drink less coffee.” Although she’s a far cry from Erma Bombeck, Toews does have a lively, memorable way of recounting the travails of modern family life: “Three balls and a diaper are stuck in the Christmas tree branches, too high to reach, and my mother is strung out on oxys, because her trigeminal neuralgia is back.” And speaking of Toews’ mother, an anecdote about her being kidnapped by the unlikeliest of criminals is worth the price of admission all by itself.
A fine turn to nonfiction by a superbly accomplished storyteller.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781639734740
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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