GREAT LINES:
At 4:00, maybe 4:30, in the morning, they were standing in our room: Rolf Isaakson, another Jewish snatcher, and two SS men. They had come in through the bathroom window of the ground floor apartment, and their weapons were pointing at us.
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Gad Beck was born in 1923 to a Jewish father and Christian mother in Austria and as he grew so, too, did fascism, the Nazi Party, and the persecution of the Jews. His sexual awakening came without hang-ups, he says. One afternoon he rushed home to his mother and giddily announced that he’d hugged his gym teacher. “’Aha, I thought so,’ she answered dryly.” That Gad Beck came of age in a peculiarly frightening time, doesn’t mean he doesn’t also remember fights with the parents, first love, and looking for a way to fit in, the sorts of things we all go through. On the other hand, most of us aren’t growing up in a war zone, with friends and family among both victims and perpetrators. Beck’s voice is personal and lively and it’s easy to get the feeling he’s telling you about something that’s just happened. He disguises himself in a Hitler Youth uniform (“It was at least four sizes too big … As makeshift alterations I tucked the sleeves and legs up on the inside.”); he makes arrangements with a smuggler (“Strunck was hardened and venal. It didn’t mean anything to him that he was saving Jews. He wanted thousands of marks per person.”); he laments the capture of a colleague bearing a list of people in hiding (“When I was in charge, there never even was a list; I always had all the names and addresses in my head. But of course, no one was really in charge anymore.”). A gay Jew in Nazi Berlin? A leader in the resistance? It is not a long book, but it gets intense. There were times I had to look again at the author photograph to reassure myself that he had survived.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: An Underground Life
GREAT LINES:
Losing someone you love is akin to a deep physical wound. It will eventually heal but there will always be a scar.
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Be warned: this is a three-hankie book. At age 14, both of the author’s parents were diagnosed with cancer. Her mother died when Smith was 18 and a freshman in college; her father died when she was 25. What’s remarkable is the lack of self-pity and clear-eyed analysis of her own grief, which will resonate with anyone who has ever lost a dear one. Smith eventually became a grief counselor with hospice services, and I have no doubt she is an amazing resource for her clients. What makes this memoir different from the many existing “I lost my parents/brother/sister/husband” titles is Smith’s background as a therapist, in conjunction with her personal experience. She divides her story into sections based on Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). However, she tells her story in a non-linear fashion that frames grief in the larger concept of survival. So while you watch her engage in substance abuse and abusive relationships, you’re also seeing her as a compassionate, competent individual who has lived through incredible loss and come out the other side, stronger and grateful for the experience. The description of her father’s death is simply put, exquisite prose, unembellished and real. This is the defining story of the author’s life, but I sure hope she writes another book- she is a remarkable writer.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Rules of Inheritance
GREAT LINES:
What it all boils down to is the simple fact that my mother is insane. Not dangerously insane, I’ll grant you, but nonetheless completely bats..
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Adam Chester’s mother is not just a helicopter mom, she takes it to a whole new level. And she manages to do it not just when her son is a small child, nor only when he lives near her. No, her nosy intrusion into Adam’s life is achieved largely through the US Postal Service and continues across state lines well into his adult life. She has opinions about his his roommates, the clothes he wears, his jobs, his wife and every other imaginable topic. As well, she is preoccupied with her own insurance and estate planning and regularly reminds Adam about these things. Her behavior is beyond neurotic and Adam’s exasperation is palpable. The overall effect would be bleak if it weren’t so darn funny. Not only does Adam’s writing make the material approachable, it was particularly delightful to listen to the audio version read by Adam and his mom. You can hear his annoyance, while she is strictly deadpan. On the whole this was a good bit of self-indulgent Schadenfreude. There is nothing like someone else’s misery to make me feel more satisfied with my own life, and at just 3 1/2 hours it was over before I could start to worry about them.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: S’Mother
GREAT LINES:
The warm air, the wine, and the melancholy beauty of the night filled me with a delicious sadness. It would always be like this, I thought. The brilliant, friendly island, full of secrets, my family and my animals around me and, for good measure, our friends.
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I think it’s hard to find a more appealing book to read aloud than Gerald Durrell’s accounts of growing up with an eccentric family on the island of Corfu in the 1930s. His two books of memoirs, of which this title is the second (the first being My Family and Other Animals) are a marvelous combination of rich, evocative language and hysterically funny accounts of a family of determined iconoclasts- human, animal and reptile. Durrell later became a famous naturalist, and from birth was fascinated with living things. He collected pets of all sorts, even as a young boy in London, but his passion for animal collecting got a huge shot in the arm when the Durrell family moved to the Greek island of Corfu. It’s hard to say what’s more fun, his accounts of the family (the artsy brother Lawrence, of Alexandria Quartet fame; the gun-toting blowhard brother Leslie; sister Margo, obsessed with fashion and spirituality; their long-suffering mother, who dealt with most situations with remarkable equanimity; and a cast of wonderful Greek characters who become family of choice) or his adventures in the natural world, catching and collecting creatures from octopi and turtles to bats and owls. But the reason I read Durrell aloud to my children is the language: it is sublime. Save for Kipling, there’s no better way to bathe a young ear in beautiful prose and awaken a love of the written and spoken word. The chapter I reread to them most often describes Gerry’s lunch with a crazed gourmand Countess, and the descriptions of food are deliciously over the top. If you didn’t read these as a child or teen, it’s not too late- and indeed, Durrell’s work is intended for an adult audience, but suitable for anyone over 6.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Birds, Beasts and Relatives
OPENING LINES:
I was born in 1960 on Taiwan the island of my father’s exile. War, Communism and the resulting famine had driven Baba from his native Manchuria, in the northeast reaches of China. Later we moved to California via Japan. Baba named me Xuan. It means “Forget Sorrow.”
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This beautiful graphic novel is part memoir and part history as it spans several generations in Yang’s father’s family. In this book her ancestors face war, famine, and communist oppression in Manchuria. The stories of their successes and failures as well as their shifting family dynamics are captivating. And because these stories are recounted to Yang by her father, it means pieces from Yang’s own life are interwoven into the story. Her personal history hiding from an abusive ex-boyfriend stalker and working toward reconciliation with her father in contemporary America add another layer to the narrative. All of this complexity is captured by Yang’s gorgeous black-ink drawings which are evocative of the places and her character’s emotions. I read this book as slowly as possible fearing every time I picked it up that I would finish it and not have it to read the next day. It was wonderful and I highly recommend Forget Sorrow to fans of graphic memoirs.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Forget Sorrow
GREAT LINES:
Music makes us humans rich. It is the revelation of the divine. It takes us to paradise.
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Alice Herz-Sommer, born 1903 in Prague, is the oldest living Holocaust survivor. She is also an extraordinary pianist and teacher, whose skills were exploited by the Nazis to give concerts for prisoners at the Theresienstadt concentration camp where she and her family were imprisoned. Holocaust memoirs abound, but what makes Alice’s story unique is her unquenchable zest for and delight in life, and her fierce devotion to protecting her only child from the harsh realities of camp existence. Also unusual in many Holocaust memoirs, Alice’s life post-Liberation occupies nearly a third of the book, as she attempts to re-establish a life for herself and her son (her husband and mother died in the camps), first unsuccessfully in Prague before moving to Israel and finally London, where she now lives. There are many exceptional and unexpected turns to Alice’s life, but musicians in general and pianists in particular will love the section in which many of Chopin’s horrendously difficult and beautiful Etudes are analyzed for their musical content and how it reflects the events of Alice’s life at the time. 16 pages of photographs show Alice’s family, friends and career highlights but the most touching images in the book are a series of 4 photographs of Alice at age 102, listening to music in her home in Hampstead. She is thoughtfully and actively engaged with the music. The final photo shows her leaning back, hands on her cheeks, eyes closed, and a brilliant smile of rapturous delight. Inspirational to pianists, certainly, but it’s an unforgettable and uplifting story that will engage many.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Alice’s Piano
GREAT LINE:
Here was the strangest part: I completely forgot that I’d sworn never to speak to her again, and that she’d left me years before without a word of explanation, without so much as saying goodbye, the way they abandon dogs when summer comes (as I put it to myself at the time), the way they abandon a dog chained to a tree for good measure.
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In this slim memoir, the author is looking back on a dinner party he was invited to by an ex-girlfriend. The relationship with this woman had ended abruptly, and the author had never really gotten over it. So the invitation throws him into a bit of a tizzy. What does it mean? What should he do? What should he say to her? We spend quite a lot of time in his head as he deals with the existential crisis that this invitation has provoked. And although he is pathetic as only the dumped can be, he is also sympathetic and very, very funny. Just when you are afraid that our narrator has been looking for meaning where there is none, we get a lovely pay off from an unlikely literary source. As French as can be, this work is whimsical and navel-gazing but in an endearing way. You will never look at a man in a turtleneck quite the same way.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Mystery Guest
GREAT LINE:
When I was carrying him, I had the constant sensation that I was a kind of radio tower, within which Adam sat broadcasting some kind of signal to the world around me – not a verbal message but an unnamed energy, a sort of goodness, that drew out people’s best selves and helped them connect with each other.
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Expecting Adam is Martha Beck’s memoir documenting the days leading up to the birth of her second child. During the pregnancy she discovers that her baby has Down’s syndrome. Both she and her husband are in their graduate studies at Harvard and on their way to academic and career success when their lives are turned upside down. Through these tumultuous days, Beck experiences a spiritual awakening that she describes in an honest, straightforward way. She experiences magical moments that stun her skeptical mind. This isn’t about conversion to religion or a New Age spirituality. It is about learning what matters in life.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: Expecting Adam
OPENING LINES:
A little square of ravioli is like a secret. You look at the outside and see the neatly crimped dough, puffed up in the center with a lovely pillow of something mysterious inside…Before you bite into it, all is unknown and much is still possible.
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Schenone’s previous title (A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove) no doubt had something to do with her quest for her own family’s history through an iconic food. What elevates this memoir is the lyrical writing and honest accounts of family estrangements. Without blaming anyone, Schenone describes the various schisms that have occurred in her extended family, and seeks to bridge them through immersion in the fine art of ravioli making. It’s fascinating to see how her great-grandmother coped with the lack of indigenous Genovese foods in Hoboken, New Jersey, using Philadelphia brand cream cheese in the silver foil package instead of the fresh tangy prescinseua of her Italian village, and Gold Medal flour instead the more finely ground Italian pasta flour (or chestnut flour). As Schenone tries again and again to discover and replicate her family’s ravioli recipes, she travels to Italy for research, eventually bringing her husband and two young sons to experience the very different pace of life, vales and mores of Liguria. Schenone realizes early on that it’s not just ravioli she’s making (or trying to make), and an especially interesting discussion with a pair of evolutionary biologists looks into the idea that perhaps certain foods are genetically tied to us because of our ancestry. There are recipes in the back, though after reading about what hard work it is to make these delicious filled pasta squares, I doubt many readers are going to try them! Not just for foodies, this thoughtful and well-researched title will also appeal to those interested in genealogy and American history.
Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken