“Sadness is so alive today,” says the author’s mother, simply referred to as Mama, and in her voice victory and guilt. She does not claim that people were happier than before, but at least “we did not fall apart on the streets like you.” Her daughter, writer and essayist Vivian Gornik, tries to gently explain to her that this is the first step.
And the sadness is alive and well, kicking and biting, stroking and sniping at this beautiful illuminator, who has received an excellent translation by Reut Ben Yaakov. But in the book, which was published in 1987 and arrives on our shelves with an unfortunate but welcome delay, sometimes also wonderful humor, joy of life and vitality, which the character of the unforgettable mama seems to have registered her own secret patent on.
Gornick keeps the promise in the title and describes intense attachments in her life, including with men (about the wild sex with one of them, a childhood friend who panicked, she writes for example: “I gave in abundance and took in abundance”). But no attachment was as intense as that of her mother, widowed 46, when her daughter was 13. “Mourning for Papa became her profession, her identity (…) her widow elevated her in her eyes, made her spiritually important, added content to her melancholy and persuasion to her speech (…) a woman-lost-you “The love of her life was now her jealous religion; she was as meticulous in it as in the Talmud.”
When a shaven-headed (formerly Jewish) representative of Hara Krishna persuades her to take an interest in his world, she erects her full modesty and declares: “Young man, I am a Jew and a socialist. “I think it’s enough for a lifetime, don’t you think?”
First in the Bronx and later in Manhattan, Jewish families, and especially Jewish women, dominate Gornik’s memory. The men were only sub-actors in the plot of her adolescence. Mrs. Drucker (whose mother calls her a whore already in the first paragraph), Mrs. Kornfeld, Mrs. Levinson (“Stop crying, Levinson, wear a bra, take care of yourself,” she is commanded by the wasted major from Mama) and many more Ashkenazi names.
One of the neighbors was unsettled and believed, among other things, that the neighbor downstairs was sending radiation to her pubic hair. The other, whose sailor husband was killed in a brawl, knits (and does not embroider) lace and is addicted to casual sex, or just human touch, though not at any cost. When the neighborhood butcher brings her a gift from the butcher shop, she beats him with a bald chicken and shrieks: “Do you think I’ll do this for chicken?”.
Mama is interested in whether homosexuals are single. “Just as lonely as we are, mother,” replies her daughter, who has always been unusually mature for her age. “What did I do to you that you hate me so much?”, She asks Gornik. And Gornik describes her reaction, or rather her lack of reaction. “I never answer her. I know it burns her, and I enjoy letting her burn. Why No? It burns me too. “
The connection between them is complex, symbiotic, sickening, inspiring and magical in its own way, even when Gornik testifies that “suddenly her life presses on my heart.” There is a “strange warrior brotherhood” between them, and they plow New York on foot, together, with the 77-year-old mother (which means his was alive, she was 112 today) and Gornik 44-year-old, and the city, for all its typology and madness, is “our natural element.” . A black beggar, “between the ages of 25 and 60,” asks Mama for a thousand dollars for a martini.
“I know there’s inflation,” she tells him, “but a thousand dollars for a martini?”, Then he growls like a wolf to the moon, wants to make love to her and claims he needs her. “I need you too,” she says dryly. “Luckily or not, I don’t need you.” They laugh a lot together, even when Mama tells of an abortion she once had in the basement of a nightclub in Greenwich Village for ten dollars, “and the doctor was the one who half the time you would wake up with his cock in your hand.”
They both have a tendency to say “it’s ridiculous” about almost anything, and they are related to each other in “cables of pity and anger.” “Our best moments together are when we talk about the past,” Gornik reveals. “Only the present she hates; As soon as the present becomes the past, she immediately begins to love it. “
Gornik shapes the past and tries to understand how much of it was real and how much it was invented. Was it really for example in the “unbearable romance” of the mother’s marriage, which “impaled us all on the cross of my father’s untimely death,” or was it a baseless glorification in retrospect of a gray and pale marriage. Mama, the tormented saint in her own eyes, claims to have gone through a lot of things in life, but Gornik returns to her: “You have not been through anything in life.”
The mother is shocked by her daughter’s impudence, and in the same breath moves on to her private cottage protest. “Do you know how much cottage cheese costs now? It is impossible to believe. “Two dollars and fifty-eight cents a pound.” Then came the comforting reconciliation. “I think we’re both equally surprised,” Gornik muses. Does not accept from the other. “
Gornik reports almost erotic excitement from the act of writing, research, and contemplation, as in the case of a “student checklist that without any warning to the heart and became a thought, a beautiful, radiant thought.”
Her thoughts really radiate at their best and illuminate the pages. Her images are surprising and accurate. She casts an occasional prostitute: “In gear there was a kind of stiffness of the muscles, as if disassembled like a doll and reassembled incorrectly”; about an acquaintance who refurbished his nose, she details: Down to the bottom of his soul. “
Many flashes belong to her mother (speaking of someone complaining about an overly dependent man: “If you want to sled in the snow you have to get ready to tow the sled”), or to Gornik’s friends (like the one who tells her about a former alcoholic lover: “He is insensitive To his feelings. He was canned with alcohol for 15 years “). Some come from those sub-players, the men. One of them explains to Gornik: “Stupid as you, with all you know, you still do not know that it is a relationship of rivalry. There are no friendships in love. “Mandatory reading