memoirs - 3 Quarks Daily

by Barbara Fischkin

On the stoop outside 4722 Avenue I, Brooklyn, New York, circa 1956. Barbara Fischkin as a toddler, atop the shoulders of her brother Teddy. With Cousin Shelli—and Barbara and Teddy’s father, Dave Fischkin (with cigar, as always). Family photo, possibly taken by Barbara’s mother, Ida Fischkin.

Moving forward, I plan to use this space to experiment with chapters of a memoir. Please join me on this journey. Another potential title: “Barbara in Free-Range.” I realize this might be stepping on the toes of Lenore Skenazy, the celebrated former New York News columnist, although I don’t think she’d mind. Lenore was also born a Fishkin, albeit without a “c” but close enough. We share a birthday and the same sensibilities about childhood. These days Lenore uses the phrase “free-range,” typically applied to eggs, to fight for the rights of children to explore on their own as opposed to being over-supervised and scheduled.

I feel free-range, myself. I don’t like rules, particularly the unnecessary and ridiculous ones. My friend Dena Bunis, who recently died suddenly and too soon, once got a ticket for jaywalking on a traffic-free bucolic street in Orange County, California. She never got a jaywalking ticket in other far more congested places like New York City and Washington, D.C.

As a kid, I was often free-range, thanks to my parents, old timers blessed with substantial optimism. I have been a free-range adult. I was a relatively well-behaved teen but did not become a schoolteacher as recommended as a good job for a future wife and mother. I wanted a riskier existence as a newspaper reporter. I did not marry the doctor or lawyer envisioned as the perfect husband for me by ancillary relatives and a couple of rabbis. Instead, I married Jim Mulvaney, now my Irish Catholic spouse of almost forty years, because I knew he would lead, join or follow me into adventures.

I left newspapering as my career was blooming to write books, none of which made me a literary icon or even a little famous. I am glad I wrote them. Read more »

by Jenny White

My friend and colleague Corky White likes to regale me with family legends, some of which are quite dramatic in both human and historic terms. They form a stark contrast to my own family history, much of which is unknown, and the part that is known consists of Bavarian peasants all the way down. At some point my grandparents moved from the Old Mill Valley to a regional city and their offspring spread themselves wide across the class spectrum and, in our case, across the globe. My uncle once put together a shallow genealogy, showing where family members were born, toiled, reproduced, and died. There are personal sagas involved in all this – my grandmother met my grandfather when they worked on the same farm, she as housemaid, he as stable boy. He stole up the stairs at night. My mother brought me with her on an ocean liner that docked in New York, where neither of us had ever been. But these are not family legends, they are not even stories people tell each other. They’re too personal, or too uninteresting to other family members who, after all, are living their own complicated stories.

What’s the difference between people who trace genealogies and families like Corky’s that collect legends? As legend has it, Corky’s grandfather, Mark Isaacs, was Abel to his elder brother’s Cain. Cain was Sir Rufus Isaacs, Marquess of Reading, Viceroy to India, who was implicated in the 1912 Marconi scandal in England. Somehow Sir Rufus put the family shame on Mark, who was expunged from the family and given a choice of Canada or Australia, where criminals were sent. If you google Marconi Scandal, you find a third Isaacs brother mentioned who actually managed the Marconi Company, but not the youngest brother, Mark aka Abel. Corky’s legend diverges from the historical narrative because legends privilege those parts of the story that have psychological saliency for the group that owns the legends. What do people learn or gain from performing these narratives at the dinner table, in the car, to children and friends?

Tag: memoirs

Midwood to Belfast and Beyond: A Memoir Begins (Working Title)

Monday, July 18, 2011

The Legend of Marcus Aurelius