A hotly disputed, would-be-tear-jerking memoir, updated with a mea
culpa. In 1951, Kelley's widowed mother was forced to leave her
eight-year-old, half-Jewish daughter in the care of Catholic nuns,
portrayed here as sadistic cartoons. "Don't think that just because
you're children you can't fall down dead at any moment," one of
them is shown telling her wide-eyed young charges. "You'll just
feel a pinprick and then you'll be gone." Such pronouncements are
hardly uncommon in Kelly's tediously macabre description of a
tormented childhood. She extensively catalogues the physical and
psychological cruelties she and her peers suffered at the hands of
the nuns, interspersing flash-forwards to her attempts to make a
home for herself on an Israeli kibbutz in 1972. Culminating in the
drowning of Kelly's angelic friend Frances, the memoir drags
readers through a long, aggrieved account filled with
one-dimensional juvenile heroes and fiendish adult villains
straight out of Dickens and 101 Dalmatians, though less cleverly
depicted. The more interesting material in this revised version is
the defense Kelly mounts against charges of plagiarism and
fabrication that surfaced after the original text became a U.K.
bestseller in 2005. This U.S. edition does not contain the passages
lifted wholesale from books like Jane Eyre, Graham Greene's
Brighton Rock and Antonia White's Frost in May, but it reprints
newspaper articles detailing plagiarism the author insists was
accidental, as well as letters from other orphans attesting to the
veracity of her story. The apologetic introduction, which seeks to
explain how a woman still grieving over her childhood found comfort
and meaning in the works of more talented writers, offers Kelly's
truest and most moving prose. Further evidence that harrowing
experiences do not necessarily make great art. (Kirkus Reviews)
In the 1950s, shortly after her father's death, Judith Kelly was
left in the care of nuns at a Catholic orphanage while her mother
searched for a place for them to live. She was eight years old. Far
from being cared for, Judith found herself in a savage and
terrifying institution where physical, emotional and sexual abuse
was the daily norm and the children's lives were reduced to stark
survival. As the months became years and no word came from her
mother, she sought comfort instead from the girls around her, and
especially the bright, angel-voiced Frances, who seemed
miraculously untouched by the nuns' persecution and the abject
misery surrounding her. When a tragic accident robbed Judith of her
dearest friend, the traumatic memories of the event were to trouble
her deeply, long into her adult life. Years later, at a kibbutz in
Israel, Judith met and befriended an elderly Holocaust survivor. It
was a friendship that began with an instinctive recognition of the
fear and suffering each had experienced, and one that would begin
an emotional journey culminating in Judith's return to the Nazareth
House orphanage to confront her memories and to achieve some
measure of peace. "Rock Me Gently" is an astonishing, moving and
deeply shocking memoir, and a story that resonates in the mind long
after the final page.
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