In My Mother's House by Margaret McMullan

Jenny is a child escapee from Vienna during WWII and daughter of an aloof, imperious Jewish father who converted to Catholicism as an adult and repudiated his ancestral heritage. Now an assimilated American, she has produced a sensitive, questioning daughter who feels incomplete and adrift because of her lack of knowledge of her mother's past. Elizabeth describes herself "immersed in death and memory," but her self-definition accurately depicts her mother.

Mother and daughter face the vexing issues survivors and their children necessarily confront if there is to be any hope of family coherence and personal mental health. Abandonment and denial. Self-eradication and the legacy of loss. Displacement and return. Memory and connection. As Elizabeth presses her mother for a full disclosure of the past and as Jenny steadfastly rebuffs her daughter's attempts to explore what the mother has walled off, both women risk having their hearts "tighten up" as though they were "hardened candy."

At the onset of the novel, Elizabeth is unaware of her mother's past, presumably content with her present status as an American Catholic, newly relocated from Mississippi to Chicago's North Shore. "My mother never spoke of the past." The child Elizabeth is aware that members of her family perished during World War II, but she "had to figure `the war' out on" her own. Not illogically, she concludes that the "death camps were for Catholics, not Jews."

While Jenny consciously obliterates any mention of the past, constructing an icy distance from her estranged father and, by inference, her family's past, Elizabeth unconsciously replicates her mother's pattern. When her great grandmother regularly sends her pieces of tarnished silverware, the child hides them under her bed in a box, next to her grandfather's discarded autobiography, "which lies facedown...an arm's reach away." The dulled family heirlooms come to symbolize an obscured, painful history, too ugly to use but too precious to discard.

During Elizabeth's adolescence, her mother's obdurate silence crystallizes into an emphatic declaration: "I swore no more questions about the past...about what was dead and gone." Already conscious about her family's differences from their affluent, assimilated Midwestern neighbors, Elizabeth determines "that I would never ask another question about what was dead and gone." Her fear is that her "mother's past would run our little family." Yet denied history does not disappear, and as Elizabeth matures into adulthood, her unresolved appetite for historical authenticity gnaws at her; her resultant anorexia causes her body to disappear but her hunger for truth to grow.



I loved this book. The alternating voices, the richness of the language...just WOW!