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Books: Growing Pains
Lev Raphael
Dysfunctional, volatile though loving parents create a world of chaos and fear for their children
In Nora Eisenberg's tragicomic debut novel, Lucy Lehman grows up in a working-class Bronx neighborhood after World War II with angels for parents.
Her mother Tippy is at first a "goddess-angel": beautiful, graceful, warm, creative, vibrant, eccentric. Though she�s a dance teacher, Tippy isn�t remotely a disciplinarian, and often forgets barre work with her students, preferring more improvisational exercises. Charmingly high-handed, she seems like a cross between Auntie Mame and Holly Golightly in her disregard for rules, order and the ordinary. Kindly neighbors try to turn her into a balebustah, mistakenly thinking her capable of cooking regular meals and doing household chores, but these attempts are fruitless.
Despite her collection of eccentricities, Tippy does have a "normal" mother�s radar for catastrophe, able "to see even from blocks away holes in construction site fences that children could fall through to their death, or potholes that old people could trip in, breaking their backs." When timid Lucy starts -- for her own eccentric reasons -- wearing a scarf over her hair in bed, her mother warns it could strangle her, and when Lucy tries a shower cap instead, her mother forecasts death by smothering.
Perhaps her radar isn�t surprising because Tippy is so intimate with disaster. Her father never married her mother and as a mamzer (bastard) she is something of a pariah to relatives and in-laws. But worse, she herself married an angel -- an avenging angel. A World War II veteran and son of "grocers and knish makers and shtetl cooks," Lucy�s father returned home bitter, angry, inflammable. Though he can be generous and loving, and was supposedly a sweetheart before the war, he�s unpredictable and more often a holy terror than anything else. He beats his wife and Lucy and her older brother, Nick, and storms from their apartment in rage after rage; and Tippy inevitably becomes more unpredictable and dangerous herself.
Ultimately, Lucy�s father leaves for another woman and Tippy succumbs to prescription-drug addiction that turns her into a cruel, self-pitying imitation of her former happy-go-lucky self. She was challenging enough as a free spirit; as a harpy, she�s impossible.
Before he leaves, Lucy�s parents speak Yiddish when they don�t want the kids to understand what they�re saying, but their behavior at the best of times is a foreign language. Melodramatic, sarcastic and abusive to each other, they seem entertaining to outsiders, a "poor man�s Zelda and Scott," though Lucy and Nicky at a very early age grow sick of this familial theater of the absurd.
The author of three books on writing, Eisenberg is a professor of English at the City University of New York. She has labeled this a "memoir-novel" and used an epigraph from "Huckleberry Finn": "...mostly a true book with some stretchers." If it were a novel, we�d ask how much is autobiographical and if it were a memoir, we�d ask how much is invented -- Eisenberg has cannily preempted both questions.
She expertly captures the strange mixture of fear, love, helplessness and shame living with such combustible, frightening parents. At one point, for instance, Lucy decides that her father screams and slaps "because he cared so much about us. And sometimes, when my dread was so thick that it was hard to breathe, I�d feel gratitude to him, for preparing me for all the battles awaiting me."
For all his terrifying anger, however, there�s a bizarrely comic note to their father�s attacks on Lucy and her brother, at least the verbal ones. An anarchist by temperament, he�s too disorganized to have ever joined the Communist Party, but he breathes the rhetoric. As if denouncing defections from the party line, when he�s angry at his children, he condemns them as "petit bourgeois brats" and "declassed debris of late-stage capitalism." And Nicky for a while picks up this contemptuous world view. When a school principal hits him with a pointer, he mocks her: "You know, violence is often the mark of the desperate. I pity you." Even Tippy�s idiotic harangues have a kind of grand, pathetic comedy to them.
Lucy and Nicky are "indispensable to each other for understanding and solace." For several years they develop a singing act that seems to offer hope in the midst of family chaos and despair. With Nicky on guitar, they perform lachrymose Yiddish songs for audiences at synagogues, Jewish clubs and community centers, always ending their program with the Warsaw Ghetto "Partisan�s Song." While they make some money and get away from their increasingly violent mother, it doesn�t last. Both of them have to grow way up and escape into their own lives from the trap of their parents�.
Eisenberg captures the sad arc of their young lives with a mix of economy and poetry in this elegy to the powerlessness of youth caught in what feels like a dark fairy tale whose ending gets worse and worse.
Lev Raphael is the book critic for NPR�s "The Todd Mundt Show" and author of "Burning Down the House."
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