A Reason to See You Again begins with a family Scrabble match in Chicago in 1971. It is clear from the first sentence — “Oh, the games families play with each other” — that games will serve as a metaphor in Jami Attenberg’s affecting eighth novel.
Rudy Cohen, the charismatic and beloved father of the family, is a Holocaust survivor, sickly and weakened from his time in the camps, and a closeted gay man. His younger, American-born wife, Frieda, has devoted her life to caring for him. Frieda is a secret drinker, bitter about her fate, and increasingly cruel to her two daughters, Shelly and Nancy, who are teenagers at the start of the novel. After Rudy’s death, Nancy escapes into an early marriage and motherhood, while Shelley graduates high school early and enrolls at Stanford.
Ironically, given her family’s difficulty communicating and her own inability to connect with people, Shelley is one of the first employees at a startup that perfects cell phone technology. (And, in a further twist, it is cell phones that drive our society apart and spur an epidemic of loneliness.) The pink phone on the cover of the book hangs off the hook, suggesting a missed or interrupted connection, with no human in sight.
The novel offers an unflinching look at the potentially destructive consequences of the caregiver role thrust on women. Frieda, who cares for her husband as well as for the residents of the nursing homes where she works, knows no other way to express her love and retreats further into alcoholism, which affects the next generation. Meanwhile, the men are conditioned to take whatever they want — as evidenced by Nancy’s husband’s ongoing affairs and hidden families — and the women are left to pick up the pieces. Attenberg skillfully relates the corrosive effect of familial lies and secrets throughout several decades. The book also touches on survivor’s guilt and assimilation into non-Jewish culture.
No one comes out unscathed, and scarred characters act out in unsurprisingly damaging ways. All of the women in the book (Shelley, Frieda, Nancy, and Nancy’s daughter Jess) manage to hurt people they care about, both inside and outside the family. Despite being a feminist icon, early tech guru Shelley looks the other way as her male boss sexually harasses a series of female hires.
Shelley, looking at a picture of Muammar Gaddafi on the cover of Time magazine, thinks, “You know who the real terrorists are? Your family.” At one point in the book, reflecting on a lifetime of strife within her inner circle, Shelley muses that the women of her family, despite their love for one another, are “always just in the state of playing this game.” A Reason to See You Again hints that redemption is possible, however. The book ends with Scrabble games between Frieda and Shelley, who has chosen to take care of Frieda at the end of her life.
Lauren Gilbert is Director of Public Services at the Center for Jewish History in New York City, where she manages the Lillian Goldman Reading Room and Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute and arranges and moderates online book discussions.
