Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Samuel G. Freedman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 22, 2005

When Samuel G. Freedman was nearing fifty, the same age at which his mother died of breast cancer, he realized that he did not know who she was. Of course, he knew that Eleanor had been his mother, a mother he kept at an emotional distance both in life and after death. He had never thought about the entire life she lived before him, a life of her own dreams and disappointments. And now, that ignorance haunted him.

So Freedman set out to discover the past, and Who She Was is the story of what he found. It is the story of a young woman's ambitions and yearnings, of the struggles of her impoverished immigrant parents, and of the ravages of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Holocaust.

It is also the story of a middle-aged son wracked with regret over the disregard he had shown as a teenage boy for a terminally ill mother, and as an adult incapable for decades of visiting her grave. It is the story of how he healed that wound by asking all the questions he had not asked when his mother was alive.

Whom did she love? Who broke her heart? What lifted her spirits? What crushed her hopes? What did she long to become? And did she get to become that woman in her brief time on earth?

Who She Was brings a compassionate yet unflinching eye to the American Jewish experience. It recaptures the working-class borough of the Bronx with its tenements and pushcarts, its union halls and storefront synagogues and rooftop-tar beaches. It remembers a time when husbands searched hundreds of miles for steady work and wives sent packages and prayers to their European relatives in the desperate hope they might survive the Nazis. In such a world, Eleanor Hatkin came of age, striving for education, for love, for a way out.

Researched as a history, written like a novel, Who She Was stands in the tradition of such classics as Call It Sleep and The Assistant. In bringing to life his mother, Samuel G. Freedman has given all readers a memorable heroine.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This thoughtful work tells the life story of the author's mother, Eleanor Hatkin, a feisty woman who tried to buck tradition and died at 50 of breast cancer nearly three decades ago. "Besides having been my mother, besides having been my father's wife, besides having been someone who died miserably and died young, I did not know who she was," explains Freedman, author of the National Jewish Book Award–winning Jew vs. Jew. Bothered by the vanishing memories of his dead mother, the author, at 45, set out to reexamine the life of the introspective, witty woman who grew up in a stifling, conservative, Jewish East Bronx home during the 1930s, '40s and '50s. With touching anecdotes supplied by Freedman's relatives and Eleanor's surviving friends, the author relays how Eleanor clashed with her domineering mother, with no support from her dad, "a doting father but a weak man," over issues of love, marriage, education, culture and career. A vivacious, attractive woman, Eleanor had her pick of several beaux, but was denied the love of her life because of his Catholicism and the calculated wrath of her mother. The book's final section shares some deeply captivating moments, with Freedman blending poetry, his own emotions watching his mother's life end, and painstaking detail to create a moving finale. Photos. Agent, Barney Karpfinger. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Freedman's mother, Eleanor, died of cancer at age 50. Thirty years later, he has written a vivid story, her story, with all the narrative energy of a novel. She was a lovely girl, and she loved being admired. She grew up in the East Bronx, surrounded by Jewish Eastern European immigrants like her family; she had boyfriends and one bad marriage before the good one; during World War II, she basically supported her entire family and attended college. She had flash and grace. Freedman is too hard on himself for the callow undergraduate he was during his mother's dying, but most of the tale is rich in remembered conversations, postcards from the front, Yiddish sayings, and the texture of what the Jewish Bronx was like in the 1930s and 1940s. He does it with the same meticulous research skills he used in Small Victories (1990) and Jew vs. Jew (2000): a painstaking mosaic of memory, interview, document, and artifact. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (March 22, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743227352
• ISBN-13: 978-1419346897
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #971,554 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars When we reach the age when our first parent died ...., May 20, 2005

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life (Hardcover)

When we reach the age when our first parent died we have to come to a kind of realization that they didn't have any more than we're already had. Somewhere about then many of us start to reflect a bit on the life that that parent lived.

In my case it was a father who lived very poor in rural Arkansas. His father ... well this is not my family's story. It was later that I realized what he had gone through working in the hot Louisiana sun to give me a couple of college degrees.

I wish that I had the way with words Mr. Freedman has to put down the story of his mother's life. Indeed I'd like to have even researched my father's life as extensively as he has his mothers.

It was certainly a different life in the East Bronx than it was in the Arkansas Ozarks. I don't think better, or worse, just different. Mr. Freedman's grandmother had a major and not necessarily beneficial impact on his mother's life. My father's mother had died when he was six (childbirth).

Mr. Freedman has taken this story beyond just the story of one lady, it's a tale of the life of new immigrants living the Depression Era American Jewish experience. It's a good tribute to Eleanor Freeman. It's also a good tribute to Samuel Freedman.

He, like I, think of the casual cruelty we caused our parents. We'd like to go back and fix a few things, say a few things. But we can't. Instead, we smile and think of the things our kids have done, and we don't mind.

Mr. Freedman, your mother is, I think, looking down on you with pride, as I think my father is with me -- even though we know we don't deserve it.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Compelling Tale, July 27, 2005

By 

Seth Faison (Princeton, NJ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life (Hardcover)

The first page grabbed my attention, and the following pages would not let me go. Samuel Freedman's reportorial handiwork, digging out and writing his own mother's story, yields a deeply involving tale. I liked the rich slice of American history that he shows us, tracking his mother's upbringing in the Jewish neighborhoods of the Bronx. But even more, I liked watching the development of a young American woman, struggling against an overbearing mother, exploring the world of exciting young men, suffering through a difficult first marriage and finally becoming a mother of three herself, only to be tragically stricken with cancer and early death. Thousands of other American women lived similar lives, but few have their story brought to life as beautifully as this one. I was touched by how Freedman recalls with shame his own behavior as a typically headstrong teenager, asserting his independence from his mother, and how, after her death, he failed to visit her grave. This book is a loving effort to get to know and commemorate his mother as she really was, by employing his considerable skills as a journalist, historian and writer. I found it quite moving.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Moving Account of an Ordinary Life, August 26, 2005

By 

Judy Klein "Jewish Librarian" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life (Hardcover)

I found Freedman's account of his mother to be melacholy and moving. All our parents remain a mystery to us when they live, more so when they die. Freedman's rejection of his mother in life and embrace is death is deeply touching.