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Let Me Tell You About My Mother: Two Daughters Re-Story and Restore Their Aging Mothers

Let Me Tell You About My Mother: Two Daughters Re-Story and Restore Their Aging Mothers Two daughters undertake to “restory” their aging Jewish mothers. Their projects serve as a demystification of motherhood, as an insight into the ever-changing mother-daughter relationship, and as a way to “restore” a parent whose life story is being masked by the facade of aging. Kim Chernin's In My Mother's House (1983) chronicles the life of Rose Chernin, Communist activist, while Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments (1987) focuses on a woman who spent most of her life in a Bronx tenement. Both writers are children of powerful mothers to whom they are strongly connected, and their writing describes their ongoing struggle to separate from these women. Gornick and Chernin become the bearers of family histories which will be passed on to the next generation, and a “voice” for first-generation woman whose stories have never been told. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Aging and Identity Springer Journals

Let Me Tell You About My Mother: Two Daughters Re-Story and Restore Their Aging Mothers

Buchbinder, Anita
Journal of Aging and Identity , Volume 5 (1) – Oct 6, 2004
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12 pages

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Publisher
Springer Journals
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by Human Sciences Press, Inc.
Subject
Social Sciences; Sociology, general
ISSN
1087-3732
eISSN
1573-3491
DOI
10.1023/A:1009597431871
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Two daughters undertake to “restory” their aging Jewish mothers. Their projects serve as a demystification of motherhood, as an insight into the ever-changing mother-daughter relationship, and as a way to “restore” a parent whose life story is being masked by the facade of aging. Kim Chernin's In My Mother's House (1983) chronicles the life of Rose Chernin, Communist activist, while Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments (1987) focuses on a woman who spent most of her life in a Bronx tenement. Both writers are children of powerful mothers to whom they are strongly connected, and their writing describes their ongoing struggle to separate from these women. Gornick and Chernin become the bearers of family histories which will be passed on to the next generation, and a “voice” for first-generation woman whose stories have never been told.

Journal

Journal of Aging and Identity – Springer Journals

Published: Oct 6, 2004

References

  • Altered Loves: Mothers and Daughters During Adolescence
    Apter, T.
  • Telling the mother's story: History and connection in the autobiographies of Maxine Hong Kingston and Kim Chernin
    Barker-Nunn, J.
  • The Jewish Woman in America
    Baum, C.; Hyman, P.; Michel, S.
  • Writing Mothers, Writing Daughters: Tracing the Maternal in Stories by American Jewish Women
    Burstein, J. H.
  • In My Mother's House: A Daughter's Story
    Chernin, K.
  • Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory
    Chodorow, N.; Contratto, S.
  • Daughters of the Shettle: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation
    Glenn, S. A.
  • The Romance of American Communism
    Gornick, V.
  • Fierce Attachments
    Gornick, V.
  • The Mother/Daughter Plot
    Hirsch, M.
  • Jewish-American Stories
    Howe, I.
  • Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
    Rich, A.