In My Mother's House

Kim Chernin

Description

In My Mother’s House depicts a profound, intergenerational struggle between a powerful, politically engaged mother, Rose, and her spiritually inclined poet and writer daughter, Kim. Framing this collision are two other generations. There is Rose’s mother from the shtetl, a broken woman regularly beaten by her husband but the source of the family’s stories. And Kim’s daughter, a second-generation, fully assimilated girl of eight at the time the book begins. Four generations, from the shtetl to an affluent intellectual household in Berkeley, California, the story is a historical record and reckoning between the old activist left and a beginning feminist movement. The double narrative allows Kim to explore the evolving relationship between mother and daughter, who, through their storytelling, are brought to a profound understanding and reconciliation.

July 1974

She calls me on the telephone three times the day before I am due to arrive in Los Angeles. The first time she says, “Tell me, you still like cottage cheese?” “Sure,” I say, “I love it. Cottage cheese, yogurt, ricotta . . .” “Good,” she says, “we’ll have plenty.”

The second conversation is much like the first. “What about chicken? You remember how I used to bake it?”

The third time she calls, the issue is schav — Russian sorrel soup served cold with sour cream, chopped egg, and onion with large chunks of dry, black bread. “Mama,” I say. “Don’t worry. It’s you I’m coming to visit. It doesn’t matter what we eat.”

She worries. She is afraid she has not been a good mother. An ac¬tivist when I was growing up, Communist Party organizer, she would put up our dinner in a huge iron pot before she left for work each morning, in this way making sure she neglected no essential duty of a mother and wife. For this, however, she had to get up early. I would watch her chopping onions and tomatoes, cutting a chicken up small, and dicing meat while I ate breakfast, sitting on a small step ladder at our chopping board.

Now, thirty years later, she’s afraid she won’t be able to give what¬ever it is I come looking for when I come for a visit. I’m laughing and telling my daughter about her three calls, and I am weeping.

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Part One: Wasn’t I Once Also a Daughter?

The Proposal

The First Story My Mother Tells

Childhood in Russia (1903–1914)

Oy, My Enlightenment

The Second Story My Mother Tells

Do This for Me, Rose

The Third Story My Mother Tells

A Larger World (1920–1928)

Three Sisters

The Fourth Story My Mother Tells

I Fight for My Mother (1928–1932)

Wasn’t I Once Also a Daughter?

Part Two: The Almond Giver

She Comes to Visit

The Fifth Story My Mother Tells

Motherland (1932–1934)

A Walk in the Woods

The Sixth Story My Mother Tells

The Organizer (1934–1938)

The Rose Garden

The Seventh Story My Mother Tells

Letters (1938–1940)

The Almond Giver

The Eighth Story My Mother Tells

A Birth and a Death (1940–1946)

Part Three: The Survivor

414 East 204th Street

The Crossroads

The First Story I Tell

Hard Times (1947–1952)

Take a Giant Step

The Second Story I Tell

A Communist Childhood (1952–1957)

A Knock at the Door

The Third Story I Tell

Motherland Revisited (1957–1967)

What Remains

Epilogue

Sujets

• Women
• Biography
• McCarthyism
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612495989
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for In My Mother’s House
“This recollection story … has an ingenious operatic construction.”
— T HE N EW Y ORK T IMES B OOK R EVIEW
“ In My Mother’s House … tells of the near ruin of Chernin’s relationship with her mother; the book, itself the product of seven years of story-telling, reminiscence—and inevitably, quarreling—is the instrument of their reconciliation, a final exorcism of their enmity. The reader is the richer for it.”
— T HE B ALTIMORE S UN
“[One of the] two most important books for me in the last year … for the precision of Chernin’s expression and the information revealed about ‘red diaper babies’ and their parents during the McCarthy years.”
—A LICE W ALKER , T HE N EW Y ORK T IMES B OOK R EVIEW
“In this extraordinary double biography, the author presents her mother’s story as the passionate main theme to the reflective counterpoint of her own life. It is a Jewish version of Maxine Hong Kinston’s memoirs of growing up Chinese-American, and it is held together by abounding tension and love.”
— P EOPLE M AGAZINE
“ In My Mother’s House is an extraordinary book.”
— G UARDIAN , N EW Y ORK
“I read this book nonstop, riveted … for anyone interested in the vanishing history of those days, this book should be top of list.”
—J ESSICA M ITFORD
“This is a warm, engrossing biography and a fascinating history of a period that has vanished only surfacely.”
— W EST C OAST R EVIEW OF B OOKS
“The most compelling kind of history—living, breathing, first-person history that pulses with vivid emotions and memories.”
— N EW D IRECTIONS FOR W OMEN
“Read In My Mother’s House to know what it was like on the Left or as a teenage girl in the fifties, but read it more for its dazzling literary structure, its passionate intelligence, and its ferocious clarity.”
—L OUISE B ERNIKOW
“It would have been enough if … Kim Chernin had translated into print the many stories her mother Rose used to tell.… That she succeeds brilliantly in doing this, as well as bringing us four generations of Chernin women and the peculiarly female power that continues to pass between them, is truly astonishing.”
—P AT H OLT , S AN F RANCISCO C HRONICLE
“Unique, thoughtful, compelling, and moving…”
— L IBRARY J OURNAL
“Kim Chernin’s exquisitely controlled narrative weaves back and forth between the story-telling present … and the past summoned up by the stories themselves.”
— P HILADELPHIA I NQUIRER
“…stands out as a poignant account of a Communist woman torn between her political passion and her sense of family duty … eloquently describes what life was like for women in the movement.”
— T HE V ILLAGE V OICE
“[There is] Chernin’s rare poetic talent for deft description, for capturing cadences of and gestures of speech. Also, she possesses a unique ability to render the wordless … a look it has taken her nearly 40 years to understand; or how eyes spill; or the heat of an impassioned hand.”
— S AN F RANCISCO R EVIEW OF B OOKS
“This brave and thoughtful memoir is an artistic triumph that brings rich characters to life while quickening the feelings that lie at the heart of every family’s struggle.”
—H ELEN M AYER , N EW Y ORK N EWSDAY
“The skillful, passionate, powerful writing held me literally riveted but for those moments, I paused to wipe my eyes. I could hug the world in deep, deep gratitude for such a book as this.”
— W OMANBOOKS R EVIEW
“ In My Mother’s House stands out as a rich example of autobiography, biography, fiction, and oral history.”
—E MILY Y OUNG , I N T HESE T IMES
OTHER BOOKS BY KIM CHERNIN
My First Year in the Country: Memoir
Lesbian Marriage: A Love and Sex Forever Kit
Everywhere a Guest, Nowhere at Home: Essays
The Seven Pillars of Jewish Denial: Essays
The Girl Who Went and Saw and Came Back: A Novel
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Her Mother: Essays
My Life as a Boy: A Novel
Cecilia Bartoli: The Passion of Song , with Renate Stendhal
In My Father’s Garden: Memoir
A Different Kind of Listening: My Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow: Essays
Crossing the Border: An Erotic Journey: A Novel
Sex and Other Sacred Games: A Novel , with Renate Stendhal
Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search of Herself: Essays
The Flame Bearers: A Novel
The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity: Essays
The Hunger Song (Poems)
The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness: Essays
In My Mother’s House
In My Mother’s House
A Daughter’s Story

Kim Chernin
Purdue University Press • West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright 2019 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the Library of Congress.
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55753-871-0
ePub ISBN: 978-1-61249-598-9
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-61249-599-6
Originally published: New Haven: Ticknor & Fields, 1983; San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2003.
Cover image: “Mother and Daughter,” 1995, Larissa Chernin
For Michael Rogin
Beloved Friend
1937–2001
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
PART ONE Wasn’t I Once Also a Daughter?
The Proposal
The First Story My Mother Tells Childhood in Russia (1903–1914)
Oy, My Enlightenment
The Second Story My Mother Tells
Do This for Me, Rose
The Third Story My Mother Tells A Larger World (1920–1928)
Three Sisters
The Fourth Story My Mother Tells I Fight for My Mother (1928–1932)
Wasn’t I Once Also a Daughter?
PART TWO The Almond Giver
She Comes to Visit
The Fifth Story My Mother Tells Motherland (1932–1934)
A Walk in the Woods
The Sixth Story My Mother Tells The Organizer (1934–1938)
The Rose Garden
The Seventh Story My Mother Tells Letters (1938–1940)
The Almond Giver
The Eighth Story My Mother Tells A Birth and a Death (1940–1946)
PART THREE The Survivor
414 East 204th Street
The Crossroads
The First Story I Tell Hard Times (1947–1952)
Take a Giant Step
The Second Story I Tell A Communist Childhood (1952–1957)
A Knock at the Door
The Third Story I Tell Motherland Revisited (1957–1967)
What Remains
Epilogue
Foreword
By Marilyn Yalom
S hortly after In My Mother’s House was published in 1983, I added it to the reading list of a course I had been teaching on twentieth-century women’s literature. Kim Chernin quickly earned her place alongside a number of French and American authors selected not only because they were outstanding writers, but also because they illuminated specific aspects of their gender, including the kinship between mother and daughter.
Like Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior , Chernin’s autobiography offers a new mode of self-presentation: she tells her own story through the stories of other women in her family—mother, grandmother, aunts, sister, and daughter. In comparison to men, women have traditionally given more space in their autobiographies to people other than themselves, but this emphasis on members of their own sex was new. Such “secondary” female characters in women’s autobiographies often vie with the narrator for the spotlight. In Chernin’s case, her mother takes center stage while she, the daughter, remains in the background as a rapt participant observer.
Her mother, Rose Chernin, came from Russia as a girl and settled with her family in Waterbury, Connecticut, where she went to school, learned English, and worked in a factory. She later moved to New York, married, and became involved in leftist politics. Her forceful personality and indomitable spirit, expressed with distinct Jewish-American syntax and inflections, are brilliantly brought to life on the page so that readers can hear, see, and feel the presence of this powerful woman.
Yet all is not sweetness and light with such a mother. The daughter, while admiring her mother’s fight for justice and sharing her leftist sympathies, has her own developmental struggles. When her mother is thrown into jail and kept there for six months because of Communist activities, the daughter, who is eleven years old, is shunned by her schoolmates. During this difficult period, she finds ways—not always commendable—of asserting her own identity.
The entangled relationship between mother and daughter covers a period of more than fifty years during which the daughter evolves through three different stages. At first, like many daughters, she adores her mother and completely identifies with her. Then, beginning with adolescence and young adulthood, she struggles to separate herself from the maternal sphere in order to find her own “self.” Typically, her mother does not understand the daughter’s need for distance.
“‘Become your SELF?’ my mother would shout over the telephone, ‘Why should you need to become what you already are?’”
In contrast t