Customer Reviews

RECLAMATION: Memories from a New Orleans Girlhood

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Eva Rumpf's Reclamation: Memories from a New Orleans Girlhood delivers deft, economical pictures of daily life in the forties and fifties. For example, the routines for saving everything re-usable during World War II and the activities of laundry day with a wringer washer, a kettle of boiling starch solution, and a clothesline are vividly rendered. In these lovingly detailed remembrances Rumpf has done a real service not only for those of us who remember the times she describes, but for those who find them hard to imagine. For readers with an interest in New Orleans, her vivid descriptions of particular places and of themes such as "Food, Feasts, and Treats" will evoke the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of a city changed not only by the slow evolution of time, but by the paroxysm of Katrina.

The book also traces how a girl born into modest circumstances slowly discovered the ways that the public library and the public schools could, in combination with her own determination, help her to enter a wider world more suited to her temperament and talents. These themes will resonate with many readers' own experiences. For others they provide a vivid description of how critical these now endangered public institutions are to the ability of girls and boys like Rumpf to find their way and realize their potential.

Another theme of the book is Rumpf's struggle with her distant and difficult mother. In the last chapter, Rumpf recognizes that she never got to know her mother as her own separate person before her sudden death deprived the author of that opportunity. As a consequence, Rumpf will never really understand the dynamics of their relationship. The reader feels this loss as well. He or she may take from this book a caution to return even to painful relationships for resolution sooner rather than later, before unpredictable death takes away that possibility.

Telling one's story is never a matter of memory alone. It's also an imaginative reconstruction, whose assembly reflects the person one has become. "Reclamation" can be read as a memoir of that sort, a vehicle for piecing together the scattered parts of a life around the core of present self-knowledge.

Part inner quest, part family history, the book lovingly details a way of life that was already vanishing from the New Orleans of the author's childhood in the 1940s and 1950s: radio versions of "Sky King," Dime Cards for polio victims, liquid starch in backyard washtubs, movie newsreels, creaky wooden floors in the Woolworth's five and dime.

It should be noted, however, that the book was also motivated by the literal devastation of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. These circumstances serve as a frame for the author's story, giving it a good deal more poignancy and power than one would normally expect of a personal family record.

The narrative itself is not quite linear, although it does follow the author's general emergence from the limitations imposed by social class and an Introverted temperament into a self-determined adulthood far from New Orleans. Rather, it operates as a series of vignettes, some of which cover the same territory from different points of view.

The leitmotif of Katrina and the author's struggle to make sense of what happened to New Orleans gives unexpected resonance to the restless spirit that haunts the book throughout -- the author's unpredictable mother, whose inner life remained stubbornly opaque to her eldest daughter to the very end. One gets the sense, finally, that Rumpf is trying to put that spirit to rest by offering her children and grandchildren a window into her own psychological and emotional life. This aspect of the story is its claim to universality beyond the specific family whose background it preserves.

In summary, the book is worth reading simply for its detailed and colorful descriptions of a way of life that is now gone. But it also tells the moving story of a woman's determined struggle to find her own way, and, then, to find her way back to what she'd left behind.

Hurricane Katrina destroyed many things, some of which were memories of the past. "Reclamation: Memories from a New Orleans Girlhood" is a look back at the New Orleans of around World War II. Eva Augustin Rumpf, after the disaster of Katrina, realized that so much had been lost and now offers readers her recollection of this past that many have forgotten but Rumpf doesn't want forgotten. "Reclamation" is a snapshot of the past, which sits warmly in the heart of many readers and will educate others.

Although I have known the author for many years, I was still surprised by how much of her childhood struggle resonated with mine.

Her story illustrates how the decade into which one is born has a major impact on the way one sees the world. The shared cultural experiences of radio shows, our place in family gatherings, the rarity of meals eaten in restaurants, communal expectations of proper behavior, the stress of fitting in at school, imaginative games created and played by the children, the general background of the war, travel before motels and fast food, neighborhood stores, housekeeping when chores like washing meant real work, summer without air conditioning, fear of polio, these and many other aspects of our childhood decades are powerful influences, wonderfully portrayed by the author. The occasional connection to another, a special friend, the search for understanding of the gender roles, beyond the obvious, or trying to grasp the forbidden fruit, was handled with refreshing honesty.

The devastation of the monster hurricane is a theme of pain and wonder, like a dark shadow across the story. Those of us from another part of the country can only suspect the reality a native of New Orleans must feel.

The author has done a wonderful job organizing this feast. A banquet worth enjoying.