HITLER AND MY MOTHER-IN-LAW

Dispatches from the ashes.

Svoboda is a poet, playwright, and translator who has traveled the world to explore relationships of women and power in societies from the Nuer of Africa to postwar Japan. Here, she goes back in time to tell the story of her mother-in-law, Patricia Lochridge, one of the few women in broadcasting during World War II. As a young journalist, Lochridge reported from Berlin, and Svoboda’s memoir opens with a picture of Lochridge pointing at what are supposedly the ashes of Adolf Hitler’s destroyed bunker. While this is a work of historical re-creation, it is also an interrogation of the memoirist herself. “I am resurrecting Pat, who died in 1998, to learn the truth about her in the context of her times; her haunting of her sons; of course some truth about me, since I suspect [my husband] Steve’s attraction to me has something to do with my similarity to his mother, both of us professional writers and women who made a few foolish decisions in love, and, above all, to sort the peculiarities of what truth means today.” Lochridge moves around, works for UNICEF, and retires to Hawaii, where we join her daughter-in-law finding poetry at her bedside: “The palms rustle with geckos fleeing the sudden light of the coming and going of the clouds.” By the book’s end, readers will realize that this is less the story of a woman of the past than of all women who aspire to report from postings in a man’s world—a world in which “the willingness of people to follow leaders appealing to the most degenerate of human impulses is evergreen.” Svoboda is a poet of such reportage, whether it be from a Hitlerian past or our own present.

A poetic reimagining of a pathbreaking female reporter in a man’s world of war.