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130 chapter 5 An Autobiography of Turmoil Abandoned Mother, Abandoned Daughter It was not easy to decide whether a personal biographical essay would find a comfortable and useful place in a scholarly text on representations of desertion. While such an inclusion might be discordant, the possibility was also enticing, interesting, and could prove productive. After all, if the victims of desertion are forlorn wives whose lives were shattered as a result of their husbands’ behavior, then the victimization that deserted wives endure may also be the tribulation that abandoned children inherit and endure. The woes of these children can be read in the letters to A bintl briv, where one learns how seriously children are challenged by their struggles with poverty and social stigma, by the inability either to accept their lot in life or to change it, and by the everpresent , haunting fear of rejection. Although the effects of desertion leave their mark most noticeably on the wives who must reconfigure their lives as best they can, the ramifications do not stop there. Desertion afflicts many family members, inhabits every crevice in the household , and often contaminates friendships and communal life. When I decided to write an account of desertion in my life, I intended to focus almost exclusively on my mother’s story as an abandoned wife and only peripherally on its effects on me. For most of my life I considered my mother to be the sole victim of abandonment, because since childhood I had not perceived myself as maltreated or abused, certainly not by an invisible father’s behavior. I actually thought I had completely erased from my life the man who had exited when I was just a year old, and I firmly believed that my stern AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF TURMOIL 131 refusal ever to be a victim shielded me from being tainted by the absent and unknown parent. While gathering the memories and shards of my mother’s experiences for this account, however, I noticed that I often did not know what she actually thought or felt. Moreover, my presence intruded everywhere into her story: interacting, narrating, commenting, and attempting to analyze and interpret. Although my mother’s story was clearly not mine to tell, I thought I could perhaps write our story—an intertwining narrative of a deserted mother and daughter—if, that is, the armor in which I had enclosed myself could be breached. My mother’s story would then have to be filtered through the experiences of a daughter who refused to be, or to be seen as, a victim, and who had to come to grips with a mother who saw herself shrouded in unrelenting victimization. In the narrative of my life that I have harbored these many years, the events of our lives and my memories of them have congealed into familiar episodic vignettes about a mother who needed to maintain complete control over her child and a resolute daughter who recognized no claims on herself, no vulnerabilities, no rejection. That a candid encounter with my mother’s needs as well as my heretofore suppressed frailties and fears of rejection has come so late is probably indicative of how heavily defended were the ramparts I had constructed to protect myself from the consequences of both abandonment and an especially engulfing parent. My attempt now to explore the interlocking lives of an abandoned mother and daughter requires that I tolerate the unraveling of my standard narrative, particularly about my youth, and expose the relational areas that remained concealed from the time my father ceased to exist for me. In childhood and for more than thirty years after, I told anyone who asked about my father that he had died, but I always knew that he was probably alive and had in fact abandoned my mother and me when I was an infant. Although all our family members knew that he had deserted us, my mother had cautioned me always to tell anyone else that he was dead. She was ashamed to admit the truth and always felt that she had lost our relatives’ respect because she was “not able to keep a husband.” My mother was not religious, never referred to herself as an agune, and seemed not to worry about getting a divorce or remarrying, but the shame that generally haunts agunes did not spare her. A few decades ago, while teaching a class in Yiddish literature in which some [3.133.109.211] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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