Customer Reviews

History on a Personal Note: Stories

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I just bought the new edition of this story collection because my old edition had gotten worn out. These are stories to be read over and over again. Binnie Kirshenbaum has a funny and unique narrative voice and her vision of the world is always unexpected. Had John Cheever married Flannery O'Connor, Kirshenbaum might have been their child. Stylistically, she is much different, however, and it is her characters that most engross the reader. She gives us adult characters who have not lost their sense of imagination, juxtaposed on a world that has, shrouded with the backdrop of more recent historical events.

Maybe I am a little bit biased because Binnie Kirshenbaum is one of my favorite authors, but these stories are amazing. They read as if the author is sitting there talking to you. They are intimate, but so very honest. Her trademark--hysterically funny and heart-wrenching, daring, tells it like it is as opposed to how we want it to be. These stories span time from the 60s til the present and go from childhood to adulthood and from the American suburbs to the rural south and across the ocean. I loved each and every one of them.

As the title of this 1995 collection suggests, these stories, or many of them, may be autobiographical. At the heart of the collection are the three interrelated stories "Halfway to Farmville," "Rural Delivery" and the title story, "History On A Personal Note." Lorraine and Minna, the close friends whose stories are being told, are quite likely fictional stand-ins for the author, with Minna as Binnie, and Lorraine, for Susan Montez, the woman Kirshenbaum identifies in the acknowledgements as her best friend and as a major contributor to "Halfway to Farmville."

In the title story, the pair fly from New York City, where they live and work, to Frankfurt where Lorraine hopes to wrest her lover, Peter, from the clutches of his wife and her family. No go. But the two women do manage to stir up a potential international incident by making an unauthorized visit to Buchenwald in the days before Germany's reunification. "Halfway to Farmville" and "Rural Delivery" find Minna, who is undergoing cancer treatments, visiting Lorraine in Chase City, a rural hamlet in deep south-side Virginia. Lorraine threw over city life "for a plot of southern land that [she] could call her own" and now lives there in regret and in what is left of an unhappy marriage to an alcoholic prison guard. In "Rural Delivery" the pair make the long drive to Mount Airy, N.C., the model for Mayberry in "The Andy Griffith Show," and get their pictures taken at iconic locations associated with that tv series. But that bit of fun does not begin to address Lorraine's regret. It is time, she tells Minna that "I left here for good."

Among the other stories (there are 16 in all), "The Cape Man" and "White Houses " recount childhood experiences, "For Widgit Stands" and "Faith is a Girl's Name" draw on high school years, "Viewing Stacy from Above" and "The Zen of Driving" on married life. "Courtship" and "Jewish But Not Really" deal with parents and other family members. Kirshenbaum does a lot of with her Jewishness in these stories, a tack that allows her to deal with the harm done by anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination and know-nothingism. Bullied by an overweight, underbrained older girl for refusing on principle to join in the morning classroom Pledge of Allegiance, the victim counterattacks in an even more hurtful way in "For Widigit Stands". The result proves, once more, that one does well to keep the stones under lock and key if you live in a glass house.

End note. Maureen Howard's fulsome praise on the front cover of Kirshenbaum's earlier collection of stories, "Married Life and Other Adventures", is not enough to overcome the negative impression left by the paperback's garish cover design. No such problem with "History on a Personal Note." The cover of the first trade paper edition features an elegant map design by Royce M. Becker framing an intriguing photograph by John Curry which invites you into the book. If you haven't done so already, now's your chance to RSVP. The cover on the present edition picks up on the wig shopping expedition that took Minna and Lorraine to Farmville early in their visit. Full disclosure: Kirshenbaum is a friend of a friend.