An award-winning historian and museum curator tells the story of
his Jewish immigrant family by lovingly reconstructing its dramatic
encounters with the memory-filled objects of ordinary life. At a
pushcart stall in East New York, Brooklyn, in the spring of 1934,
eighteen-year-old Sarah Schwartz bought her mother, Shenka, a
green, wooden-handled bottle opener. Decades later, Sarah would
tear up telling her son Richard, "Your bubbe always worked so hard.
Twenty cents, it cost me." How could that unremarkable item, and
others like it, reveal the untold history of a Jewish immigrant
family, their chances and their choices over the course of an
eventful century? By unearthing the personal meaning and historical
significance of simple everyday objects, Richard Rabinowitz offers
an intimate portrait connecting Sarah, Shenka, and the rest of his
family to the twentieth-century transformations of American life.
During the Depression, Sarah-born on a Polish battlefield in World
War I, scarred by pogroms, pressed too early into adult
responsibilities-receives a gift of French perfume, her fiance
Dave's response to the stigma of poverty. Later we watch Dave load
folding chairs into his car for a state-park outing, signaling both
the postwar detachment from city life and his own escape from
failures to be a good "provider" for those he loves. Objects of
Love and Regret is closely wedded to the lives of American Jewish
immigrants and their children, yet Rabinowitz invites all of us to
contemplate the material world that anchors our own memories.
Beautifully written, absorbing, and emotionally vivid, this is a
memoir that brings us back to the striving, the dreams, the
successes, and the tragedies that are part of every family's story.
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