A Memoir
Miriam Levine
The University of Georgia Press
ISBN 978-0-8203-3986-3
2012
We enter Levin's memoir as family, friends and our journey
through her past becomes our own. We experience every chapter vividly through
her poignant writing. Each paragraph is given to us as a gift that we take and
relate to our own stories:
“My grandmother's household revolved around
rituals. Gone was the hardship of her earlier
Domestic life, when she had to take care of
her husbands' parents, her young children, and her
daughter Etta, who slowly died of heart decease
as well as to mind the fruit and vegetables store
while her husband peddled produce from door
to door from a horse-drawn wagon.”
These vignettes of family characters touch us with a soft
cloth; like the one left on the bottom of aunt Jen's hamper-- clean cotton
folded like silk. And those humorous moments startle us out of our reverence
for the writing:
'If you swallow anything, it's better to swallow
a penny or a button, it's the same shape as your
asshole.' She bounced against me as we laughed,
her still firm hip against mine...”
We follow the memories with total interest. Miriam Levine
was born with a pen in her hand and cannot be ignored as one of America's more
accomplished writers. The characters live and breathe on the page and this
reader interest was piqued throughout.
When Levine was thirteen she asked her her father Joe, a man she described as one who “fumed
in silence,” about his ideas about sex
and his ideas about intellectuality. He thought intellectual boys were not as
inclined to indiscretions:
“They're good boys,” Joe said for what seemed like the
Hundredth time. “The type to marry.” Marry? I had just
turned thirteen. I reached into my skirt pocket and pulled
out the stack of pictures. “Here.” I said, handing them to
Joe.
“We play spin the bottle.” He turned white, a safe sign: he
wouldn't yell. His mouth hardened. “What are they doing
with you?” he spit. “We were only kissing,” I answered.
I saw something in his eyes: a thought. I faked him out
and nailed the shot. He shoved the pictures into his
pocket.”
I can relate to the years the book depicts, the culture, and
because my immigrant father and factory working mother had similar experiences,
this all might explain why Levine’s writing riveted me to each page. This book
reads like a classic novel, a Chekhov story, intense and profound in its direct
depiction of people. Levine's sentences are a vista of images:
“At nine-thirty Bertocci would burst through the door,
slams down his beat-up briefcase, and begins lecturing.
He had the face of a commedia dell'arte puppet: a Punch
like sloping nose, close-together eyes, a flat wide mouth,
which pushed up duckbill-like against his nose-an unsaintly
feral face. His odd dark eyes were angry and intelligent.
His
hair was thinning, but the old hairline still showed, like
a shadow, or a scar, or a painter's cartoon: you could see
the younger head inside the old.”
Life changes dramatically. The university presented Miriam
with a new set of books to read and new characters to study. She is used to
being with family and family plots, so it became an easy transition, but there
are differences. There are more people to relate too. She steps into what life
offers, with grace and keen observation:
“Yet this morning when I thought again about courage,
I came to the conclusion that my definition of heroism was
too
narrow. Just having a baby was an act of courage, for all
women,
for those who go into it without thinking and for those who
think and decided. Pregnancy and childbirth have been sealed
in a
kind of silence, like a taboo. And the films, which were so
popular now, of mother and father training for the event in
special
classes, laboring together, even the films of the actual
birth, did
not really convey the mystery of the journey.”
Page after page, challenges the reader. The
adventures in this memoir are fleshed out witt Levine's astute observations. Levine's
descriptions give the reader a finely detailed picture. Every episode, each chapter is
polished and finished. We read on and on because we have come to live within
the book's memories:
“...if I step closer, I feel as if I am falling into his
head. Our
Augusts were usually dry, but this August it had been
raining
for two weeks. When the sun came out, the trunks of the oak
trees steamed. “How do you like the rain forest?” I had
asked,
cutting through his back garden on my way to Robbins
Library...”
With fine strokes and a light touch, Levine restores, peals
away what the patina has built up and she gets us back to the original
painting:
“Culture had thrilled me ever since I was a child stepping
into my grandmother Molly's kitchen. There I had felt
culture, both hers and ours, European and American.
The things in Molly's kitchen jutted out at me: her coffee
grinder, the little white enamel pot with its black handle,
the strawberries simmering in that pot, reducing to thick
jam, the yellow batter on her sponge, her jars of spices,
her knife worn to a flake, the Jewish newspaper open
on the table, the black “carving” of the Hebrew letters,
the radio with its glowing yellow-green dial, Bing Crosby
singing “I'm dreaming of a White Christmas.”
We travel with Miriam Levine, from her ancestral kitchen, to
Mexico and Frida Kahlo's home.
We experience the nit-nacs Kahlo surrounds her life with and her
arrangements of the the small objects of red, greens, blues and yellow
splashes. The book carries us from one country to another, and we visit with
different artists, and writers, and all of them influence us because we are
reading this book.
I recommend “Devotion.”
Devotion, cannot be read in one sitting. You will enjoy the journey and
want for more.
Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor: Wilderness House Literary Review
Reviewer: Ibbetson Street Press
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