Someone Else's Memoir
in my blood
I come from a family of writers. There’s no getting around it. My grandfather Lefty wrote poetry and translated from Yiddish and Hebrew. He was also a preeminent Zionist in the early days, which I have thought of often in the past couple of months. My father is a writer, and at the age of ninety-three still writes every day and is always working on multiple projects at once. My mother was a writer, but she doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. She wrote a book about how to make dolls house furniture in the seventies which was quite successful. I recently came across some drafts of a memoir she was writing and I’ve decided to edit it and publish some excerpts here. She would have approved. She had a wonderful voice but was also very self-conscious. She was dyslexic when this wasn’t recognized as a disability and was made to feel like she was stupid because she read slowly and spelled terribly. Her draft definitely reflects her spelling challenges, which I will correct.
I have come to understand my mother much better from reading these pieces, especially about the period of her life which was extremely chaotic and was much more traumatic for her I believe than growing up an Orthodox Jew in wartime London or even separating from my father. My mother, Joan, worked with, lived with and loved so many people during the AID’s crisis in New York City in the eighties. Most of her friends were gay men. Her roommate and best friend Greg was a gay man. She worked at the AID’s Resource Center as the Director of Volunteers for several years. She even had a bizarre romance with a gay man. One by one, most of them died. In retrospect I think she had some form of PTSD, and that this in large part led to her decision to leave New York City and move to Jamaica.
Below is the first part of a piece my mother wrote and I will give you a taste of it each week, for paid subscribers only. I jump right in to a time when my mother had established her life quite well in the town of Lucea, the smallest of the fourteen parishes in Jamaica.
I will follow up later this week with a post about tarot and my offerings. I struggle with the idea of a paywall. In fact I’ve never used one until today, but I do believe writing is work and should, if it is appreciated, be paid for. I hope the opportunity to read my mother’s words will inspire some to become paid subscribers and if not that’s ok too. If you cannot afford a subscription please let me know and I will subscribe you, no questions asked.