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Who She Was : My Search for My Mother's Life
Who She Was My Search for My Mother's Life
Author: Samuel G. Freedman
When Samuel G. Freedman was nearing fifty, the same age at which his mother died of breast cancer, he realized that he did not know who she was. Of course, he knew that Eleanor had been his mother, a mother he kept at an emotional distance both in life and after death. He had never thought about the entire life she lived before him, a life of he...  more »
ISBN-13: 9780743227353
ISBN-10: 0743227352
Publication Date: 3/22/2005
Pages: 352
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Publisher: Simon Schuster
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
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Freedman's mother, Eleanor, died of cancer at age 50. Thirty years later, he has written a vivid story, her story, with all the narrative energy of a novel. She was a lovely girl, and she loved being admired. She grew up in the East Bronx, surrounded by Jewish Eastern European immigrants like her family; she had boyfriends and one bad marriage before the good one; during World War II, she basically supported her entire family and attended college. She had flash and grace. Freedman is too hard on himself for the callow undergraduate he was during his mother's dying, but most of the tale is rich in remembered conversations, postcards from the front, Yiddish sayings, and the texture of what the Jewish Bronx was like in the 1930s and 1940s. He does it with the same meticulous research skills he used in Small Victories (1990) and Jew vs. Jew (2000): a painstaking mosaic of memory, interview, document, and artifact.


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