Description:
Ted Solotaroff's memoir of growing up with his father takes on a number of time-tested themes: paternal rage, the American Jew, a boy's love for his mother, an intellectual coming of age. But as one might expect from an editor and critic as prominent as Solotaroff, it does so in language so elegant and perceptive as to make these all seem utterly fresh. Granted, he has the decidedly mixed blessing of a subject who is larger than life, a father who rages the way through these pages like a character straight out of Shakespeare. Solotaroff Senior was a tyrant, a bully, a pathological miser, the kind of man who would "take the tender part of the steak, the breast of the chicken, and then push the platter over to Mom to cut up what was left. 'Eat bread, kids,' he'd say. 'Don't fill up on meat.'" But this is hardly a '90s-style victim memoir; Solotaroff doesn't dwell on his father's physical violence, and his analysis of his father's crippling fears and jealousies is scrupulously fair--even, at times, tender. A series of equally vivid portraits round out the book: his mother, a sensitive, cultured woman who was terrorized into passivity; the aunts, uncles, and teachers who aided young Solotaroff's intellectual development and showed him that a different way of living was possible. But again and again, it's to his father that Solotaroff returns: Who was this man, who, even in death, could play my spirit like a pipe? How had the holes been put in that he'd fingered? How had I managed to keep him from breaking it, as he had tried to do? In tracing the enigma that was his father to its source, Solotaroff reveals much about America itself, its historical wounds and its possibilities for redemption. --Mary Park
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