A Woman of Uncertain Character: The Amorous and Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted to Be a Respectable Jewish Mom) by H

By Clancy Sigal

Book Overview

This memoir is about Clancy Sigal's intense attachment to his fast-talking, redhaired, sexy, unwed mother Jennie, a firebrand union organizer, and his roaring Oedipal rivalry with his mostly absent father Leo who carries a gun to social occasions. In the wide-open, violent Chicago of the Depression and war years, Jennie, in her Cuban heels and flaming lipstick, is a single mother on welfare trying to raise a wild rebellious son in a twilight world between law and lawlessness. She is defiant, vulnerable, sexually alive, high stepping, man-loving, woman-friendly, wisecracking - fearlessly facing down hostile scabs armed with shotguns and clubs. Along with the portrait of Jennie, this book tells a rollicking, profane, and gritty tale of bottom-feeding street life, race riots, riding the rails, and what happens when a gang boy is mistakenly sent to an all-girls' high school.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786717483
• ISBN13: 9780786717484
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.0" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

What a mother, what a son!

Clancy Sigal's seeringly honest portrait of his lefty mother, Jennie, and himself brings alive a time now lost forever to Ipods, computers, and cell phones. Clancy's childhood as the sidekick of a passionate labor organizer mother often working undercover, slipping into town and skulking out when the jig is up is both hair-raising and thrilling. Even when she settles temporarily in Chicago, a secure home life is not an option for his mother, Jennie, and his on-again, off-again father. Jennie's commitment to lifting up the plight of exploited workers while bringing up Clancy is the ultimate juggling act. Lots of dropped balls but a virtuoso performance nevertheless. Clancy was mostly left to his own devices, a street kid whose aspirations were hardly more than rough and tumble fun with his little gang of misfits balanced with an instinct for survival. Ultimately, Jennie was his salvation even after he left home because she had implanted in him a moral compass more powerful than any microchip that always corrected his course throughout his crazy life journey. He's a lucky boy/man. This book is a tribute to an extraordinary mother and a rollicking good read at that.

Do yourself a favor and discover this provocative author

Clancy Sigal made me fall in love with his mother Jennie in his unsentimental memoir of a sometimes violent and crazy life. She's the mother I wish I had: passionate, irreverent, protective and smart. The pain and love Sigal feels for his mom hits you like a punch in the gut. Dynamite scenes of young, street-tough Clancy's roller coaster life with his mysterious and powerful mother are punctuated by glimpses of his current relationship with his 10 year old son Joe. Together, they invoke the spirit of Jennie as they visit her grave, throw a baseball around or jog together, and she, in turn, surrounds them with her tough, maternal love. She lives again, through Sigal's gritty and ironic style. Capone gangsters and cops-on-the-take are a normal part of the lives of this compelling mother-and-child team who, as they travel from city to city, often take false names. Always on the edge of the law, forever skipping out on landlords and creditors, they're a magnificent reminder of what it takes to stay alive in hard times: guts and guile. This memoir led me to Sigal's other books: Going Away, Weekend in Dinlock, Zone of the Interior (re-released this year - an insanely brilliant semi-fictionalized account of his time with the famous/notorious `anti-psychiatrist' R.D. Laing) and The Secret Defector. Do yourself a favor and discover this provocative author - funny, authentic, political and deeply moving.

Sigal's Best

This is Clancy Sigal's best book. His work has always been autobiographical from his novel Going Away (the ultimate 'road' book for my generation of politically aware readers who shunned Kerouac 's egowanderings), to Weekend In Dinlock, his account of Yorkshire miners. In his latest, a memoir, Sigal gives us a funny, moving memory of his relationship with his mother - a fantastic character - set in Depression era America. It's an account of an education that is unsentimental and and profoundly moral. There isn't anything like it around. This is a real book of virtues.

A Great Dame and a Bad Boy and Chicago too

A terrific story well told. I don't know when I've ever read such a robust and intimate description of the tensions in a relationship between a strong sexy mother and a hormone-soaked adolescent boy. Although the background is exotic - Chicago in the turbulent shoot-first days when cops, criminals and union activists fought in the bloody streets - anyone who has ever dealt with an teenage boy will recognize the minefield of emotions Sigal reveals. Besides drawing a pungent likeness of a remarkable woman - his mother - he makes his own street gang life accessible to the reader when he talks about why he cherishes his lawbreaking friends from the old neighborhood. It's a vanished world today, and yet it's strikingly here and now. Good writing too - loose, easy and graceful. I'm a long-time fan of Clancy Sigal's memoirs-as-novels (GOING AWAY, ZONE OF THE INTERIOR). This is memoir that just happens to read like a novel.

A terrific story about growing up poor and on the left

Clancy Sigal tells a terrific story of his life a boy with Jennie, his fierce and fabulous mother, a tough, smart labor organizer of the 1930s and 1940s. She taught him never to scab and never to tell the cops who they really were. The writing is vivid and a lot of fun -- and the book describes a political world we have lost: the rough, passionate working class left of the Depression era.