Synopses & Reviews
An acclaimed writer on her mother’s tumultuous life as a Jewish immigrant in 1930s New York and her life-long guilt when the Holocaust claims the family she left behind in Latvia
Like so many Eastern European Jewish immigrants of the time, Mary Lifton left her family in Latvia in pursuit of a better life in New York. She found work in the garment district, alongside many others from the Jewish diaspora, struggling to survive in nonunion shops, even becoming a small part of the labor union movement. Alone and subsisting on minimal wages, Mary was swept up by love in a steamy romance with a man who would force her into two back-room abortions and finally father Lillian Faderman, before disappearing from her life. But worse than his romantic betrayals, Moishe kept Mary from doing what she most needed to do: find a way to get her family out of Latvia before Hitler’s Holocaust engulfed and destroyed them. In this carefully crafted and well-documented work of reconstructed memoir, Faderman offers an extraordinary lens onto the anguish of the Jewish Holocaust survivors on our shores.
About the Author
Lillian Faderman is an internationally known scholar of ethnic history, and of lesbian history and an acclaimed memoirist. She is the author of many books, including To Believe in Women, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Surpassing the Love of Men, and I Begin My Life All Over. Among her many honors are Yale University’s James Brudner Award for exemplary scholarship in lesbian and gay studies, the Monette-Horwitz Award, and the American Association of University Women’s National Distinguished Scholar Award.
Table of Contents
Preface
Part I
Chapter 1: First week of April, 1932
Chapter 2: The rest of 1932
Chapter 3: Winter and spring, 1933
Chapter 4: Later in 1933
Chapter 5: Spring and summer, 1934
Chapter 6: Fall and early winter, 1934
Chapter 7: Winter to late summer, 1935
Chapter 8: Fall, 1935
Part II
Chapter 9: Spring and summer, 1936
Chapter 10: Late 1936
Chapter 11: Winter and spring, 1937
Chapter 12: Summer and fall, 1937
Chapter 13: Winter and spring, 1938
Chapter 14: Summer, 1938
Chapter 15: Fall, 1938
Chapter 16: Winter and spring, 1939
Chapter 17: Summer 1939
Chapter 18: Late summer and fall, 1939
Chapter 19: 1940
Afterword
Resources