A Postcard Memoir
Sutin's ingeniously constructed memoir uses duotone reproductions of postcards--by turns nostalgic, quaint or exotic--as Rorschach blots to evoke his deepest memories and feelings. In his previous memoir, Jack and Rochelle, Sutin chronicled the relationship between his father, a hero of the Jewish anti-Nazi resistance in Poland, and his mother, who escaped from a Nazi ghetto into the Polish woods where she hid and fought Germans; both emigrated to America at war's end. As the son of Holocaust survivors, Sutin, who was born in 1951 and grew up in Minneapolis/St. Paul, carried a special burden of grief and pain--and an urgent need to give his life meaning. Here he writes about typical events--Little League, his discovery of sex, bar mitzvah, past loves--but imbues his reminiscences of adolescent insecurity with a rueful, forgiving wisdom. After attending experimental Antioch College in the late '60s and a stint as a starry-eyed aspiring writer in Paris in 1973, maturity came with marriage, fatherhood and stepfatherhood. The postcards, which range from Michelangelo to Hollywood midgets to scenes of Bolivia, Idaho, Bombay and Bethlehem, are a screen on which Sutin projects his recollections, dreams and musings. But here's the catch: none of the people depicted in the postcards, and very few of the settings, are from Sutin's own life. Between each image and the corresponding text, odd juxtapositions and eerie or hilarious disjunctions fly like sparks, amplifying Sutin's memories and puncturing his wild fantasies. The past is what we make of it, he insists in this evocative if elusive postmodernist hall of mirrors. (May)Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.