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All My Mothers and Fathers

By Michael Blumenthal

All My Mothers and Fathers

By Michael Blumenthal

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Description
Shortly after his mother dies when he is ten, author Michael Blumenthal discovers a startling His mother was not his biological mother, and his aunt and uncle, immigrant chicken farmers living in New Jersey, are really his parents, and his "cousins" Amos and Judy are actually his brother and sister. With this revelation, the "mystery" that seems to have permeated his childhood is suddenly revealed and, with it, a quest for belonging and integration that will pervade his entire adult life is triggered. As in Greek Tragedy, his father, a German-Jewish refugee raised by a loveless and embittered stepmother after his own mother died, has inflicted upon his adoptive son a fate uncannily similar to his Having first adopted Michael, in part, to save his dying wife, he then bequeaths unto him the same sort of penurious and loveless stepmother whom he had to survive. In a memoir whose profoundest theme is the conflict between our wish for rectification and our struggle to contend with the dark forces urging us toward repetition, poet and novelist Michael Blumenthal presents a moving portrait of one man's struggle not to repeat unto his own son the same fate his father had re-enacted unto him, and to hold, as the poet Yeats advised, "reality and justice in a single thought."
Product details
Binding:
Paperback
Number of Pages:
272
Publication Date:
2002
Publisher:
Harper Collins
Languages:
Published: English
ISBN10:
0732275210
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