Written with both thoughtfulness and elan, this is a Jewish
intellectual's remembrance of coming of age during the Depression,
WWII, and the immediate post-war period. Editor and critic
Solotaroff (A Few Good Voices in My Head: Occasional Pieces on
Writing, Editing, and Reading My Contemporaries, 1987, etc.)
focuses largely on his relationship with his parents: his father, a
hypercritical, domineering man who often is "oblivious to other
people's feelings," and his mother, an emotionally supportive but
mostly passive woman whose behavior usually is characterized by
"scatteredness and dependency." He also writes about his slow
transformation from an unruly, sometimes delinquent adolescent to a
young man with serious intellectual inclinations. With its many
fine passages on competition and friendships with other boys, and
on men, sports, curiosity about sexual dalliances with women, and
military service, Solotaroff's book expresses a vigorous masculine
sensibility. As for his Jewishness, it's considerably less
important than his Americanness and is found more in family
dynamics than in religious observance or even ethnic solidarity.
Thus, Solotaroff observes that, for him at the time, WWII and the
Holocaust were "as existentially remote as a movie." His
well-crafted book, which is just the right length, contains such
piquant passages as this about service in the postwar navy, which
was "an abrupt immersion in the working class, in its crudity and
cruelty, its noise, crowdedness, and stinks, its narrowness and
dullness. Also, in its modes of adeptness, shrewdness,
perseverance, its gregariousness and laughter, its loyalty and
courage." Having traveled with Solotaroff through the first two
decades or so of his sometimes difficult and often very colorful
life, readers will eagerly await a sequel. (Kirkus Reviews)
Planted between Ted and a normal boyhood was Ben Solotaroff, as
hard a father to placate, defy, and finally accept as can be found
in the annals of the American memoir. Tough, bullying, seductive,
Ben Solotaroff was a self-made man "almost all ego and almost no
conscience" who made a success of his glass business and a
wasteland of his home life. Against a crystalline view of American
life in the 1930s and '40s, Truth Comes in Blows places its classic
themes the ambivalent love of a son for his victimized mother, the
romance of post-immigrant Jews with middle America, sports and
masculinity, the guilty imperatives of breaking away and renews
them with a candor Philip Roth praised as "not only a literary
achievement but a considerable moral achievement as well." A
reading group guide is bound into the paperback."
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