Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime: Stories

by Marjorie Sandor

Book Overview

"These beautiful stories freeze the sweep of the hands of the clock, they stop the beat of your heart, with the precision of their language and their generous emotion."--Frederick Busch

Linked stories follow a Jewish-American family across several generations. Clara comes from a restrained, secretive family lending the book a taut narrative tension. The big secret--her husband's adultery during World War II--is not revealed until the last...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1889330833
• ISBN13: 9781889330839
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Length: 196 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

LOOKING INTO THE HEART OF A FAMILY

One of the tricky aspects of this collection of interrelated short stories is the fact that, told from the point of view of a grown daughter looking backward, the author manages nevertheless to span some 60-70 years of time, exploring the inner thoughts of some of the characters, who most likely never revealed them to the narrator. The daughter is thus theorizing or guessing about thoughts and events - albeit it an `educated guess' most of the time - about things that not only occurred out of her sight, but in the case of some of these stories, before she was born. A formidable potential stumbling block aside, Sandor does a nice job stitching everything together - it comes across as real and believable, and at times very moving.There are secrets kept from generation to generation in every family - sometimes they eventually come out, sometimes they remain hidden for eternity. Most of the time - revealed or not - they color the psychology and temperament of the family in which they exist. It's interesting to see, as these tales unfold in chronological order, how this happens within the family depicted here.Sandor's prose flows along nicely - in each story, she manages to catch the mood of the times and the people within them. The characters are all pretty down-to-earth, yet each individual and unique in their own way - and they're all fairly sympathetic, which helps a great deal to draw the reader into the writing. All in all, a very nice read.