With one thou­sand dol­lars in her pock­et, my moth­er went on a Euro­pean tour in June 1957, when she was twen­ty-three years old. She took a fer­ry to Eng­land and caroused across sev­er­al con­ti­nents. Her par­ents kept fifty pages of let­ters she wrote to them dur­ing this time, which tell a sto­ry of the writer she could have been had she lived the life she expect­ed. She went on to teach in New York City for ten years, before giv­ing up this job when she met my very hand­some father. They shipped off to upstate New York where he had a job, and then she moved with him and my old­er sis­ter to Ger­many for sev­en months and final­ly to India for sev­en years. 

Dur­ing that time, she became less sure of her­self. While in Bom­bay she taught some, but not enough, and even­tu­al­ly became depressed. By the time she returned to the States, in 1973, her teacher cer­ti­fi­ca­tions were out­dat­ed and she couldn’t get a job in New Jer­sey after being out of full-time teach­ing for so long. She set­tled into her domes­tic life, wrote a few inci­sive arti­cles on art, taught her­self to become a pro cook, lis­tened to the radio, obsessed over the O.J. Simp­son tri­al, dec­o­rat­ed, gar­dened, took my sis­ter and I to plays, art exhibits, the sym­pho­ny, and the opera. 

Even­tu­al­ly, she began teach­ing Eng­lish as a sec­ond lan­guage to Russ­ian Jew­ish immi­grants she met in New Haven, Con­necti­cut, and that seemed to sus­tain her. But what real­ly kept her going were books. The year after she returned to the States, she start­ed a note­book list­ing the books she read from 1974 to 1985. So many are Jew­ish authors — she wouldn’t just dip in, but would go on a kick and read their entire oeu­vre. Here are entries fifty-sev­en through seventy-three:

The Sum­mer Before the Dark, Doris Lessing

The Lake, Yasunari Kawabata

The Cen­taur, John Updike

An Unof­fi­cial Rose, Iris Murdoch

Adven­tures of Augie March, Saul Bellow

Leave­tak­ing, Peter Weiss

Fri­day the Rab­bi Slept Late, Har­ry Kemelman

A Beg­gar in Jerusalem, Elie Wiesel

Portnoy’s Com­plaint, Philip Roth

A Mother’s Kiss­es, Bruce Jay Friedman

Stern, Bruce Jay Friedman 

Good­bye, Colum­bus, Philip Roth

Rembrandt’s Hat, Bernard Malamud

The Mag­ic Bar­rel, Bernard Malamud

Van­ish­ing Point, Peter Weiss

Idiots First, Bernard Malamud

What is a Jew? Rab­bi Mor­ris N. Kertzer

She read sleuthing and lit­er­ary books, and seemed to be search­ing for a sense of what it meant to be Jew­ish after liv­ing in places where it was rare or prob­lem­at­ic to be so. She had an elec­tric intel­lect, and if she had not become so depressed, she would have made a great crit­ic. Judg­ing by the books she read, I believe she had a shot at pro­duc­ing a fam­i­ly nov­el writ­ten with verve, atti­tude, and wit. I like to think that she wrote those books into her mind and they fit her per­son­al­i­ty and saved her life. Mala­mud and Roth, it turned out, became writ­ers I loved, too.

My per­cep­tion of my moth­er has changed over the course of the twen­ty-three years since she died. Some­thing shift­ed after I read the unfet­tered and elo­quent let­ters she wrote while tour­ing Europe and expe­ri­enc­ing the full­ness of an inde­pen­dent life for the first time. She had an easy, infor­mal style and a psy­cho­log­i­cal acu­ity that is rare for a young writer, but it is her star­tling excla­ma­tions, as she sailed into a new life, that altered my con­nec­tion to her. Here are some of those let­ters — a nov­el, in my mind.

Nice, Sun­day

Oh, is this mag­nif­i­cent coun­try. You two would absolute­ly rev­el in this cli­mate and scenery. We got to Nice two hours late because of some acci­dent on the way between two oth­er trains. Well, the last few hours on the train were won­der­ful because we role all along the coast, from Mar­seilles to Nice. Tall, wav­ing palm trees, a beau­ti­ful sea, and an irreg­u­lar coast line were breath­tak­ing. I’m sit­ting in a park now right off the famous Prom­e­nade des Anglais, which runs along the Mediter­ranean for miles. Went swim­ming yes­ter­day; the water was an emer­ald green; and just the per­fect tem­per­a­ture. Had a Jew­ish sup­per last night — real chopped liv­er. What a city Nice is. The shops every­where are expen­sive and lux­u­ri­ous­ly beau­ti­ful. It’s not a com­mer­cial tourist town, like oth­er places I’ve seen, even though the joint is hop­ping with Amer­i­cans. The hotels are most­ly white, not more than five sto­ries and noth­ing as showy as in Las Vegas. It’s real­ly all it’s ​“cracked up to be.” The sun is hot and it stays out till about 8 at night. Today we relax on the rocky beach; tomor­row to Cannes and Antibes. Tues­day to Mona­co, and Wednes­day we’ll see. Prob­a­bly leave here Wednes­day night or Thursday.

Only a Brook­lyn girl would be this excit­ed to find chopped liv­er. What’s unusu­al is the way she starts and ends this para­graph — ​“Oh” and then the inver­sion, with the verb first. Every­thing is record­ed — the acci­dent between two oth­er trains is bare­ly men­tioned before she moves on. It is a del­i­cate and writer­ly way of telling more of the sto­ry than we will ever know. The wreck hap­pens qui­et­ly in the back­ground, just as Mrs. Ram­sey dies and World War I comes and goes in Vir­ginia Woolf’s To The Light­house, and sim­i­lar to the way that in Natalia Ginzburg’s Fam­i­ly Lex­i­con, polite con­ver­sa­tion is hap­pen­ing at the table but World War II has arrived. 

Here is a sec­ond pas­sage, on her way out of Swe­den, that feels like the fun­ny-true stereo­types that Roth knots him­self into. She was glad to be rid of the Swedes, who she found ​“too pas­sive, dull, unin­ter­est­ing, and phleg­mat­ic. Not intel­lec­tu­al at all.” As she planned her trip to Berlin, she had a few ideas about Germans: 

What oth­er peo­ple don’t do when trav­el­ing the Ger­mans know how to do. They’re always on the go; they deprive them­selves of almost all food save black bread, cheese, or but­ter and bread; and, of course, milk. They go by bicy­cle over places that oth­ers find too dif­fi­cult to tra­verse. They nev­er feel sor­ry for themselves.”

For a while, she loved Ernest Hem­ing­way and said she ate up all of his books. I remem­ber her talk­ing about see­ing the bull­fights. She didn’t tell me the whole sto­ry, and she sensed the oppres­sion there:

I abhor see­ing the vari­eties of uni­forms all about me — on the trains, the streets, the bus­es, the restau­rants, the the­atres, the hotels, the beaches…I’m los­ing inter­est in things Span­ish you can see. Anoth­er thing too: in Valen­cia, I went with my Dutch friends to a big bull fight at their grand Plaza de Toros. You can imag­ine my excite­ment at see­ing one at long last, since it’s some­thing that’s intrigued me for a long time — ever since read­ing Hem­ing­way. Anoth­er let­down! Bru­tal, blood, and just ridicu­lous­ly futile…why??? ​“Why” is all I could say after it was all over. All the pomp and glo­ry became trag­i­cal­ly absurd to me. You should have seen the excite­ment, the mobs of peo­ple scur­ry­ing about after it end­ed. It looked like a wild pas­sion-rid­den mob rac­ing about all around the large plaza. We were lit­er­al­ly swept along with the crowd. 

The oth­er fifty pages of her let­ters are a riot, full of snark, joy, and exclam­a­to­ry moments of wel­comed expe­ri­ence, din­ner with for­eign­ers, vis­its to muse­ums, sit­ting in on a mur­der tri­al, rid­ing a motor­cy­cle, brown­ing on beach­es, and going to bak­eries to col­lect her beloved French bread, but­ter, and milk. She stayed in hos­tels, learned Swedish and col­lect­ed Berlitz books, went to Shake­speare plays and Wag­n­er operas, befriend­ed every­one, vom­it­ed off the side of the steam­er. She cre­at­ed a traveler’s tale, a com­ic nov­el in let­ters, a chron­i­cle of a hos­tel-to-hos­tel jour­ney in the 1950s; she raged about the state of Amer­i­ca, and felt buoyed talk­ing pol­i­tics or phi­los­o­phy and going on dates. She thought about going on the lec­ture cir­cuit. Life did not get in her way.