In his memoir, My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy, acclaimed poet and scholar Edward Hirsch presents his early life in Chicago in “microchapters.” The form — quick, deadpan — embodies the Jewish culture that Hirsch was raised in: each chapter is devoid of sentiment yet concentrated with life. Perhaps the microchapter that best serves as an ars poetica is “Conversation with My Mother”: “My mother was heating a can of chicken soup on the stove. ‘You really shouldn’t make fun of me,’ I said, ‘you’re my mother.’ She barely turned her head. ‘Don’t be so sure, kid.’” Like the mother, the microchapters don’t acknowledge pain, nor provide comfort. They instead teach a different kind of survival practiced by many midcentury Jewish descendants of Holocaust survivors: just try to keep up.
Chapter 8 documents how the antisemitism faced by Hirsch’s grandparents turned into the assimilation of his parents. This chapter notes not only the antisemitism that his grandparents faced, but also the unique difficulties of Midwestern Jews. In the microchapter “Der Tog,” Hirsch writes, “My grandfather got a job traveling through the Midwest selling ads for the Yiddish daily Der Tog (The Day). He didn’t drive and took trains everywhere. I asked my grandma what it was like for him navigating states like Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska. ‘There were very few takers,’ she said. ‘It was meshuga.’” In “Bad Signs,” Hirsch writes, “My grandparents wanted to rent in Logan Square. There were signs on apartment buildings that said, ‘No dogs or Jews allowed.’ Hatred is no joke. They moved to another block.” This microchapter is immediately followed by “In the Old Country,” which goes, “There were signs on apartment buildings that said ‘No Jews or Devils Welcome.’ In the New Country, dogs were disruptive, but devils were not a problem.” His grandparents’ generation was othered by American society and thus retained a Jewish identity marked by separation: In “Ashkenazim,” Hirsch writes, “The old men spoke with accents. They had fled pogroms, or ten years of military service, or bad marriages. They checked Other on government forms because they did not consider themselves White. That was for gentiles. ‘Use your keppie,’ my grandfather said, which meant my noggin. ‘We’re not white. We’re Jewish.’”
If only it were that simple. Hirsch’s mother Irma, father Ruby, and stepfather Kurt raised Hirsch with their generation’s own unique Jewish culture. By the time they are married and raising Hirsch and his sisters, Irma and Kirk have moved to the suburb of Skokie, which by then “advertised in gritty Jewish neighborhoods on the South, West, and North sides. They would have carpeted the East Side, too, but that’s a lake. The message was clear: ‘Sick of the city? Want to escape to suburbia? We’re not scared of you.’” In “History of a Village (6),” Hirsch writes of Skokie, “Fifty-eight percent of the population was Jewish. About 7,500 were Holocaust survivors…On the census, the survivors didn’t know what to mark. My parents checked White.” This whiteness was a Jewishly marked one: “Important Lessons,” a list of dietary laws from Ruby, includes “Don’t worry about pork in egg rolls, but pork chops are not allowed.” When Irma makes a collage of Hebrew letters to hang in the basement she unknowingly hangs the letters “out of sequence.” When Hirsch’s high school football coach calls him in for blocking drills, Hirsch — careful to protect his head from unnecessary contact — calls back sarcastically, “No way…My mother raised me to study Talmud.”
Parts of the book hint at Hirsch’s future. After giving up touchdowns, Hirsch’s high school football coach confronts him at halftime: “He picked up a large metal garbage can and pounded it up and down on the locker room floor. ‘Hirsch,” he shouted, “stop thinking about poetry!” We meet his grandmother’s “Green Couch,” which is kept in pristine condition under a plastic couch protector. “One day I would inherit my grandmother’s green couch in near-perfect condition. I kept it in my study and moved it from city to city for thirty years. All my difficult reading took place on that couch, which was comfortable for naps. Everyone commented on the color. No one liked it but me.” Hirsch’s grandfather was also a poet. When Hirsch asks about his grandfather’s poetry, it becomes clear that the family disposed of it because no one saw value in poetry— “My mother waved away the question — the fact that he wrote poetry only proved that he couldn’t adapt to the New World.” In another microchapter, Hirsch notes, “My dad’s charm was practical. He explained his theory of being a salesman: “You have to kiss some strange asses.” In “Working Motto,” Hirsch goes on to add, “My dad’s maxim has followed me throughout my working life. It was an accurate forecast. But I have spent much of my life around academics. He had no idea how strange.”
The triumph of My Childhood in Pieces is that it is able to capture a specific Jewish American experience not only in content but also in form. From using words like “keppie” — familiar Yiddish English lexicon that combines the first half of the Yiddish diminutive for head with the English diminutive ending ‑ie/-y — to using microchapters because no other form could possibly keep up with the merciless hustle of a Jewish American family trying to go from escaping genocide to the security of midcentury suburban America within one generation, My Childhood in Pieces commemorates a family’s survival with the same tough love used to survive it. By the end of the book, you can imagine the mother cheering, as she does in “Touchdown”: “My friend Mike was the announcer for the games. Whenever I scored a touchdown, he shouted over the loudspeaker for my parents to stand up. My dad waved from his seat. My mom jumped to her feet. She clasped her hands over her head like a prizefighter, and everyone cheered.”
Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017), a finalist for the Berru Poetry Award and the Ohioana Book Award.
