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.
Mục lục
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
Giới thiệu về tác giả
Kim Chernin, Ph D, has won acclaim for her numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including
A Different Kind of Listening, My Life as a Boy, T
he Obsession, In My Mother’s House (nominated for Chronicle Critics Award and chosen as Alice Walker’s Favorite Book of the Year in the
New York Times, 1983
),
The Flame Bearers (
New York Times Notable Book, 1986), and the national best seller
The Hungry Self. She lives in Point Reyes, California, with her life-companion, Renate Stendhal, and their two dogs, Buckle and Teddy. She is a nationally recognized expert in eating disorders and also is in private practice.