A Leak in the Heart: Tales from a Woman's Life [Hardcover]

Faye Moskowitz (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0879235519 | ISBN-13: 978-0879235512 | Publication Date: April 1, 1985 | Edition: 1st

These are twenty-four autobiographical story-essays, witty, vulnerable, and wise, about growing up part of a puzzled and unassimilated Orthodox Jewish family in a Michigan small-town in the 1930s and '40s and about the wider world of marriage, children, teaching and writing after that rich beginning.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The litany to self-pity that these stories intone makes reader empathy redundant. Each protagonist neglects and thus alienates the significant other in her life, as if the woe that besets her were hers alone. In "A Leak in the Heart," we are offered a dead baby, an inconsolable mother and a presumably untouched father, denied the sexual congress that, one infers, for the wife never amounted to more than obedience to her marriage vows. "Irene" also seems only provisionally married, to a man whose paycheck she squanders and whose unsatisfactory child she bears, driven by her uneventful existence to shopping sprees and stealing. Almost equally despondent is "Thelma," a young girl victimized both by the penuriousness of her family and the outrageous size of her nose, conditions made interdependent by the refusal of her mother to pay for plastic surgery. Nicely fashioned prose and a sprinkling of brilliant images notwithstanding, the overall dolor of this collection muffles even the most graceful of authorial touches.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Review

Feeling alternately like Mother Goose and the wicked witch, Moskowitz hangs on to her vision just long enough to give us a lesson in the sweetness, and pain of this life. --San Francisco Chronicle

This small gem of a memoir is so deftly faceted that, though it is made up of separate vignettes, one soon perceives a pattern. --Washington Post Book World

A] lyrical drama of Americanization. --Los Angeles Times

Product Details

• Hardcover: 161 pages
• Publisher: David R Godine; 1st edition (April 1, 1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0879235519
• ISBN-13: 978-0879235512
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,434,306 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sharply-written and often astonishing tales, November 7, 2008

By 

Jack Harms (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Leak in the Heart: Tales from a Woman's Life (Paperback)

Moskowitz's gift lies in telling what seem like small tales from an ordinary life, a life busy with living and dying, though by the time one is done reading, one sees she has caught the deep resonance within things. I think the word "tales" in the subtitle--a word Moskowitz has used for at least one other of her books as well--is a way of speaking to the ways in which these stories straddle the border between memoir, with its intimacy, and fiction, with its artistic shaping. The PW review above is nuts. I wish more of Moskowitz's work were in print. Get this!