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A Mother's Steps: A Meditation on Silence, by Mark Jay Mirsky
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A Mother's Steps: A Meditation on Silence is the novelist Mark Jay Mirsky's attempt to understand the life of a mother who was reluctant to tell him any details about her family or herself. Concealing much of her strong affection for her son, she began to reveal it after learning that she was dangerously ill. The book tries to un-riddle the silence that Ruth S. Mirsky drew over her childhood, adolescence and the first years of her marriage. She remained a mystery to her son after her death at the age of fifty-six in April of 1968. Why had she spoken so little about her mother and never about her father? The subject had been taboo while she was alive and even Ruth’s husband, Wilfred, the author’s father, was puzzled when asked. Spending many hours beside her bed in the hospital through her last six months of life brought her son together with his mother in ways that he had never expected. In her final weeks, she asked her son if her illness was fatal, and he had to reveal what no one else had told her. Aged twenty-nine at the moment of his mother’s death, it changed the author’s understanding of reality and fiction. It led to his first immersion in Orthodox Jewish prayer as he assumed the responsibility of mourning for his mother and experienced her return to him in the world of dreams. A Mother’s Steps describes the process of a son piecing together a narrative of his mother’s life to understand her. He began with the extensive photographic albums his mother kept from the age of thirteen, just after the death of her own mother, Annie Lessler, in October 1925. He interviewed surviving siblings from her family of twelve brothers and sisters and over a period of forty years recorded older cousins’ recollections, gathered photographs, immigration and census records. The book reconstructs the history of Ruth’s father, Joseph Lessler, and his wife, Annie, their passage from Poland and the businesses they managed as new immigrants to America, first in silks on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, then in Annie’s Brooklyn real estate, and finally in fabrics in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The book is not only a history of an American-Jewish family’s immigration, its internal struggles and assimilation into American society; it is also about his mother’s secret life: her love of theater, her identification with screen heroines, her commitment to social justice. The author searches his own memories, his mother’s letters to him, and the dreams in which she appears to him after her death to explain the powerful bond between them. The only one of her six sisters to gain a college degree, Ruth S. Mirsky graduated from the Simmons College program in social work and helped run an orphanage in Rhode Island, after which she served at the FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Administration) supervising offices throughout New England. After marrying the author’s father, a young lawyer named Wilfred S. Mirsky, she went to Ironton, Ohio, as a Red Cross disaster worker during the disastrous Ohio floods of 1936-37. Returning to Massachusetts to work for the Jewish Family Welfare Society, she managed her husband’s political career, which included four terms as a state representative in the Massachusetts legislature. Serving in several public capacities, she was appointed in the 1950s for a term as a commissioner on the Commonwealth’s Industrial Accident Board. While proud of his mother’s public life, her son also felt, however, her reserve in expressing affection. Scanning her albums carefully, the notes she wrote beside them, thinking about photographs that she did not include in their pages revealed much of what she had kept private. They contradicted the previous picture her son had of Ruth, and explained something of the last years of her life when she reached toward him past her self-imposed boundaries. This book tries to construct a new portrait of his mother, asking questions the author might have, if he had known her better.
- Sales Rank: #1608623 in Books
- Published on: 2016-01-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .66" w x 6.00" l, .87 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 290 pages
About the Author
Mark Jay Mirsky was born in Boston and grew up in the Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury districts, which border Franklin Park to the east, north and south. Attending Boston Public Latin, Harvard College and Stanford University, Mr. Mirsky has previously published five novels, "Thou Worm Jacob," "Proceedings of the Rabble," "Blue Hill Avenue," "The Red Adam," a collection of short stories called "The Secret Table," and his latest novel, "Puddingstone." Among his books of criticism are: "My Search for the Messiah"; "Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah"; "The Absent Shakespeare"; and "The Drama in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Satire to Decay". He is the coeditor of "Rabbinic Fantasies" (Jewish Publication Society, reprinted by Yale University Press) "The Jews of Pinsk," Volumes 1 & 2 (Stanford University Press), and the editor of "Diaries" of Robert Musilin English (Basic Books). He founded the journal FICTION in 1972 with Donald Barthelme, Jane DeLynn, and Max and Marianne Frisch and has been its editor-in-chief up to the present. A professor of English at The City College of New York, he has served as its chairperson and director of Jewish Studies. His reviews and articles on architecture and literature have appeared in The New York Sunday Times, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The Massachusetts Review, Partisan Review, The Progressive, Haaretz, and numerous other publications. His play "Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard" was performed at the Fringe Festival in 2007 and is available at www.indietheaternow.com An autobiographical essay published in 1999 on Mark Jay Mirsky can be found in Volume 30 of Gale’s Contemporary Authors, and a chapter is dedicated to him in Jules Chametzky’s collection "Out of Brownsville"
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
A Mother's Steps Is Hypnotically Moving
By Genese Grill
A Mother’s Steps: A Meditation in Silence is a complexly moving account of the author’s search for his mother—a mother had been beside him all along, though elusive, though hidden by masks and fictions, though often silent and seemingly distant. Mirsky’s account is as much about his own failure to break through the distance, to take advantage of the moments when closer intimacy might have been possible, as it is about the details of his mother’s life that he gleans from the scanty evidence in photos, letters, journals, and the few stories he was able to force out of her often incommunicative siblings. Thus, while this beautiful book paints a rich and evocative picture of the times and places of his mother’s life, it also transcends time and place and speaks to the eternal and universal bittersweet nature of familial relations. As Mirsky discovers too late that his mother’s seeming disapproval of him was masking deep love and pride, when he rereads a letter from her that was warmer than he had remembered, when he re-examines moments when he might have seen through her cool veneer to see her own vulnerability and disappointments, he is touching the ultimate human tragedy.
The time and place of the book are, however, vividly drawn, as the book’s characters span over generations from the 19th century forefathers to his own children who are young adults today. A passage from his childhood sickbed demonstrates Mirsky’s often hallucinatory lyrical prose, moving back in time:"I watch the light playing on the perfume bottles on Mother’s dresser of blond rock maple, a part of their set of twin beds, the colored photograph of Mother’s favorite sister, Miriam, her brother Bob, a frame of her mother Annie’s smiling face and dream myself into the world of a tin box full of sewing needles and buttons, painted with men and women in the costumes of the mid-19th century, high silk hats, billowing skirts, horses and buggies, walking and riding round its oval shape."
There are many such moments throughout the book, syncopated by humor and dramatic revelations, as Mirsky discovers of unravels surprises from his mother’s past. The reader shares the narrator’s frustration at the persistent secrets and his excitement at the small strands of evidence, as he circles back, again and again, to the bits and pieces of history he gleans; as he reevaluates old photographs, trying to see something different in them after learning this or that new bit of information, reading the old scraps of evidence in ever new ways as he himself changes over the decades, and over the course of the investigation—most of all, as he changes in the wake of his mother’s death and the last months of surprising intimacy. There is a circular motion to the book, which continually reminds us that our ancestors are ever with us; that we are not, ever, merely moving forward in time, but always circling back and inward as well. Mirsky writes: "Still, as I turn to the pages of her albums and sift through the boxes of my letters she collected and find several that she left for me, present time begins to exist as a dream without the sequence of a sun-centered planet, circle following circle, where child follows parent in one cycle of separation after another that only death’s snapping interrupts."
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
An evocative portrait of both a family and period in ...
By L. E. Marshall
An evocative portrait of both a family and period in history, A Mother's Steps captures the universal complexities and mysteries of the relationship between mother and child. In his mother Ruth, Mirsky discovers a character torn between a professional life and a family life, and within those lives her roles as a caretaker and an independent and creative spirit, thus revealing the complex and evolving role of women in the first part of the twentieth century. As Mirsky uncovers more details about her life, we come to understand her struggles and resentments (and resulting reticence) not by means of any particular tragedy, but through the endless compromises she has made as an immigrant, a daughter, a sister, and ultimately as a mother. In closing Mirsky wonders of his mother, "What do you see of you in me," but the broader question inspired by her story is the ubiquitous "What if?"
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By david hochman
A terrific work by a thoughtful and careful writer.
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