Shortly after his mother dies of breast cancer when he is ten years old, author Michael Blumenthal discovers a startling fact: His mother was not his biological mother, and his aunt and uncle, immigrant chicken farmers living in Vineland, New Jersey, are really his parents.As fate would have it, his father, a German-Jewish refugee raised by a loveless and embittered stepmother after his own mother died in childbirth, has inflicted on his adoptive son a fate uncannily -- and terrifyingly -- similar to his own: Having first adopted Michael, in part, to help his dying wife, he then imposes on him the same sort of penurious and loveless stepmother whom he had to survive.With these revelations, the "mysteries" that seem to have permeated Michael's childhood are laid bare, triggering a quest for belonging that will infiltrate the author's entire adult life. All My Mothers and Fathers is Michael Blumenthal's moving and powerful account of how he put his life together, and made both a break from and peace with his past.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Poet and novelist Blumenthal's biological parents, New Jersey chicken farmers, gave him away at birth to his uncle and aunt, Holocaust survivors who raised him as their own son in Manhattan. He learned this when he was 10, the year his adoptive mother died. "The truth is," he writes in this memoir, "I have had two of everything two mothers, two fathers, two siblings, two versions of manhood, two homes. And all I want is to have one." After his adoptive mother's death, his adoptive father remarried an uncaring woman who "may have damaged forever my ability to love as I would choose my ability, even, to love myself the way an intact human being should." Blumenthal (Dusty Angel; When History Enters the House: Essays from Central Europe) is a deft storyteller, relating his desire for belonging, despite the trying environment, but his memoir is distorted by rage and self-pity. His stepmother, for example, is one of the "women who, cumulatively, never showed me a minute of anything that could conceivably pass for a mother's love." His adoptive father flirts with stereotype, a passive old Jewish man who mutters, "God loves you and so do I," endlessly. With the exception of a sharp account of the author's second wife, the book is cast with ciphers, while the author's own needs and grievances emerge almost too vividly, as when he writes, "Neither man nor animal nor saint nor God... can help me shoulder the burden of my parents." Agent, Lane Zachary.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Blumenthal, a poet and director of Harvard's creative writing program, has written the touching story of his search for his true identity. After he was born, his biological parents left him to be raised by his aunt and uncle; it was not until later that he discovered that his "parents" were in reality not his birth mother and father. After the woman who raised him died of cancer, his adopted father married again, and this unloving stepmother made his life extremely difficult. Although many of the events in Blumenthal's memoir are traumatic, his narrative is filled with humor. In the final sections, with the deaths of his two fathers and stepmother, the mood changes, and his thoughts on his heritage as well as his legacy to his own son are reflective and deeply moving. Adding to the book's pleasures are selections from Blumenthal's poems that relate to the events and moods of the narrative. Recommended for all public libraries. Morris Hounion, Ursula C. Schwerin Lib., NYC Technical Coll., Brooklyn
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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More About the Author
Michael Blumenthal graduated from the Cornell Law School with a J.D. degree in 1974, after studying philosophy and economics at the State U. of New York at Binghamton. His seventh book of poems, And, was published by BOA Editions in May, 2009. A graduate of Cornell Law School and formerly Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, he is the author of the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers (Harper Collins, 2002), and of Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, 1999). His novel Weinstock Among The Dying, which won Hadassah Magazine's Harold U. Ribelow Prize for the best work of Jewish fiction, has recently been re-issued in paperback, and his collection of essays from Central Europe, When History Enters the House, was published in 1998. A frequent translator from the German, French and Hungarian, he practices psychotherapy with Anglophone expatriates in Budapest and spends summers at his house in a small village near the shores of Lake Balaton in Hungary. In May of 2007, he spent a month in South Africa working with orphaned infant chacma baboons at the C.A.R.E. foundation in Phalaborwa, an experience about which he has written for Natural History and The Washington Post Magazine. He currently holds the Mina Hohenberg Darden Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. He was the featured poet at The Power of Writing Journal Conference in Denver in June of 2008, and currently holds The Copenhaver Visiting Chair of Law at The University of West Virginia College of Law. He can be reached at: www.michael-blumenthal.com
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poignant,
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This review is from: All My Mothers and Fathers: A Memoir (Paperback)
A poignant memoir...especially since it was written by a former neighbor. I had no idea he suffered such heartache.
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