Women and their fathers: rereading our histories

I recently read three books -- two memoirs and one cultural review -- that explore women's complicated histories with their fathers. It's not as charming as you might think.

Book reviews:

Judy Bolton-Fasman, Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets, Mandel Vilar Press (August 24, 2021) Paperback, ‏ 248 pages

Aileen Weintraub, Knocked Down: A High-Risk Memoir, University of Nebraska Press (March 1, 2022), ‎ 311 pages

Jan Lisa Huttner, Tevye's Daughters: No Laughing Matter: The Women behind the Story of Fiddler on the Roof, FF2 Media, LLC; 2nd edition (July 17, 2019) 124 pages

I did not set out to read about women and their fathers. It just worked out that way. In two cases, I thought I was reading women’s memoirs about topics of high-risk pregnancy and Cuban-American Jewish history. But both centered around the authors’ discoveries of their fathers’ secret past. In the third book, I thought I was engaging in cultural criticism with a scholarly analysis of Fiddler on the Roof, but alas it was all about fathers with daughters. In any case, this string of readings left me with some intense reflections on the roles of our fathers in our lives, and how adult women revisit our own histories — including me.

Judy Bolton-Fasman, the daughter of a Cuban Jewish mother and an older, patriotic WASPY-wannabe Connecticut father, crafts a page-turning family history in her memoir Asylum. Her flammable household growing up was one of drastic cultural differences, her mother’s extreme mood-swings and tantrums, her father’s emotional distance and reticence, and a volatility that at times led to violence. Although the story ultimately focuses on Bolton-Fasman’s efforts to uncover her father’s secret past, in the process, she reveals that it wasn’t only her father who held difficult secrets but also her mother. Bolton-Fasman brings these riveting tales to life with tranquil sensitivity, intricate writing, and rich multi-cultural and multi-lingual description. Her family story provides a unique glimpse into American history in central America and the role of the Jewish community in Cuba around some key historic events. I don’t want to give away spoilers, so I’ll leave it there. It’s quite the drama.

Bolton-Fasman is a wonderful writer, and her story makes a vital contribution to American Jewish history. It us a story is unlike any other you will ever likely read, and offers rich insights into often overlooked corners of Jewish culture.

For me, one of my lingering questions about the book is less about the historical context and more about relationships she describes — specifically, about the difference between the author’s relationship with her her mother versus her relationship with her father. To be sure, she has good reason to characterize her mother as, well, crazy, and the shame and insecurity she felt as a child are palpable. But given what we learn about how the mother came to end up in the life she had — and how easily traumatized women are cast as insane — the characterization feels unfair. We don’t really know if the mother was emotionally erratic before she got married — although she was all of 21 years old at the time, and did not have much of an opportunity to develop as an adult before then. But it seems that her behaviors were likely a result of the awful origin story of the marriage, piled on with decades of living in a marriage built on lies. All this on top of the of traumas of leaving behind her beloved home, country, family, language, and community, in the midst of personal and political upheaval, to live in a place where she had no ties, interests, or understandings. Anyone who went through what she did would probably also have lost their minds. And significantly, there was nobody in her life helping her cope with those experiences, and certainly not her husband.

On the other hand, the author is much kinder in her descriptions of her father, and describes herself as her father’s daughter, even while sharing that he was often aloof, self-involved, unaffectionate, and even violent towards her mother.

I’m oversimplifying the writing a bit. Bolton-Fasman is a masterful wordsmith, and her writing is full of descriptive nuance. She alternates delicately between telling her father’s story and her mother’s story. Still, it felt to me like the balance of sympathies was askew, and as a reader I was hoping she was be at least as critical of her father as she was of her mother.

This is quite a common phenomenon. Children in abusive homes often unconsciously sympathize with the abuser for many complicated reasons. Whether it’s a function of Stockholm Syndrome, internalized patriarchy, the charming personality traits of the abuser, a myriad of fears, or the fact that those who are abused often become abusers themselves — or insane — whatever it is, children are often counterintuitively more connected to the primary abuser than to the victimized parent. It is obviously very hard for a child to see that or understand those complex dynamics. And thus traumas of abuse get recycled and repurposed, transmitted from one generation to the next in morphed iterations.

Still, even if the author isn’t very angry at her father for not tending to his wife’s emotional needs, I am.

Obviously that’s not fair. It’s not my life to be angry about. Every single person in this world — including the author — has the right to experience their lives in exactly the way that they need to. But I suppose I read books at the same time that I’m processing my own life, so this is what comes up for me. I am mad at Judy’s father. And I feel bad for her mother. She was used and abused, literally. This is one of the main imprints that the book left me with.

Of course this raises another big question that nags at me in my life, which is this: If people hurt other people because they were hurt themselves, should they be forgiven for that? It’s very easy for me to sit here and say that I understand why Judy’s mother lost her mind — but it’s not my place to forgive her. I’m not the one who was hurt by the mother’s erratic behavior. So who am I to say such things?

Plus, as I always say, everyone has choices. We all have choices. Even people who struggle with their own traumas have choices. Judy’s mother had choices in her life. So there’s that.

But ultimately, it’s her story to tell, and she does it beautifully.

After I read the book, I chatted with the author about some of these issues and she told me that many readers have been contacting her to talk about their own family dysfunctions. I guess I’m not the only one to have been triggered this way. I don’t think that was the intention of her writing, but I’m not alone in having had that experience.

The memoir is not so much about recovering from emotional dysfunction as it is about uncovering the many secrets that created the odd structure that was Judy’s family. I’m reading trauma and abuse into it because that is where MY head is at, not because that is the author’s angle. Just to be clear.

Whether you are interested in Cuban-American Jewish history, American foreign policy in Central America, intriguing family drama, the dynamics of dysfunctional families, or just good memoir writing, I highly recommend this book.

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Imagine my surprise when I picked up a book that I thought would be on a completely different topic — what was meant to be a humorous memoir about one women’s experience with months of prenatal bedrest — only to discover that this book is ALSO about the author’s discovery of her father’s secret past.

Aileen Weintraub’s Knocked Down, which reviewers had described as very funny but which was way too serious for me to laugh about (I’m such a downer, I know), is not exactly what it is purported to be. It is a story about a Jewish woman from Brooklyn who marries a non-Jewish guy, moves upstate into a crumbling old house in the middle of nowhere, and ends up on months of lonely and painful bedrest after the discovery of monster-size fibroids competing with her baby for space in her uterus. Although the book offers snippets of comic relief, for the most part, I was not laughing.

During much of this difficult pregnancy, Weintraub’s new marriage is in disarray, to say the least. Her husband is cold, distant, distracted, unaffectionate, and both physically and emotionally absent. Although they end up somehow resolving the relationship (again, I don’t want to give away too many spoilers), I missed the part in which the author satisfyingly describes how exactly he changed his entire personality to be the partner she needs and deserves. I was waiting for some kind of dramatic twist. I didn’t see it. So that was very hard reading for me. As someone who has spent decades involved with issues around relationship abuse, I cannot read this kind of text without seeing zillions of red flags. Very, very not funny.

Moreover, Weintraub — like Judy Bolton-Fasman — is a daddy’s girl. She glows about her father’s charming voice in her life while mostly kveching about her mother. This is even though her mother is the one person who actually showed up for her, with suitcases full of food, traveling hours on the bus, putting her own opinions about things aside, to meticulously clean for her daughter and feed her when she desperately needed help. Again, the mother gets mocked for doing this while the father gets the voice of the angelic, wise, omnipotent guide in her head.

This dynamic went from irritating to scary once the truth started emerging in the story. Her father was not only a deadbeat who refused to smile, socialize, participate in household chores, or work for a living, and spent many years on the couch in a funk. He was also very possibly guilty of some unethical or illegal mob-connected behavior that he was once arrested for. AND, even though his wife stayed with him and supported him and cleaned and cooked for him throughout all this, the guy went out of his way to annoy her. This is a woman who cleaned every surface and crevice of the house while her husband lay on the couch watching reruns — and he found this so funny that he would sneak crumbs of his forbidden ham sandwich into some of those crevices in the kitchen table, just to see her reaction. Hardy har har. The author, always the daddy’s girl, thought this was funny, too. The red flags popping up in my brain evolved into screaming alarms.

Mind you, all the information I have is from the author’s telling — and yet, somehow, this is supposed to be packaged as humor. But the facts are all there. At one point, the author admits that her father was very possibly not a nice person at all. But that assertion went nowhere. Meanwhile, the author comes to a compassionate understanding about her mother towards the end, but that also feels like too little too late. Those mild, almost invisible moments of revelation were left fleeting and perfunctory, and did not challenge the underlying injustice of how she frames her parents, especially given what she now knows about the realities of their marriage.

This book was hard for me to read. Again, I am left with this repeated observation that children of dysfunctional relationships so often forgive the abuser, side with the abuser, and even idolize the abuser. Even though parts of this book had me turning pages, and the author is a talented writer, I found the story extremely problematic. It was too confronting and unamusing, and I found the ending disturbing and lacking the insights that it needed. I am wondering if she may have a very different memoir to write in a few years’ time. I feel like the story is not done. Not even close.