American Born

"American Born is Rachel Brownstein's incisive memoir of a seemingly quintessential Jewish Mother-her own-who lived life as the heroine of her own story. When she arrived alone in New York at age eighteen, in 1924, Reisel Thaler resembled the other Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe who accompanied her. Yet she already had an American passport tucked in her scant luggage. She was, as she would boast to the end of her days, "American-born." Reisel Thaler had drawn her first breath on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1905, then was taken back to Galicia (in what is now Poland) by her father before she turned two. So it was that Reisel could truly say, when she immigrated years later, that she was American-born. That proud insistence, Brownstein writes, "was about citizenship and status as well as birthplace. Also, it seems to me now, about talent. She was born an American the way another girl might be born a figure-skater." Brownstein began writing about her mother during the Trump years, dwelling on the stories she told about her life and on the questions they raised about nationalism and immigration and stories generally. For most of the twentieth century, Brownstein's mother gracefully balanced her identities as an American and a Jew. Her values, her language and her sense of timing, inform the imagination of the daughter who recalls her in her own old age. The memorializing daughter interrupts, interprets, and glosses, sifting through alternate versions of the same stories. Cousins from the old world and other more and less American Jews fill out the picture. But the central character of this book is Reisel, who eventually becomes Grandma Rose, watching and judging, singing, baking, and bustling"--