NONFICTION

STUFFED: ADVENTURES OF
A RESTAURANT FAMILY

By Patricia Volk
(Alfred A. Knopf; 239 pp.; $23)

r-

SLEEPING WITH CATS

By Marge Piercy
(William Morrow; 245 pp; $25.95)

Nt.41t--
Patricia Volk was a
restaurant princess.
When she'd dine at
Morgen's, the white-
tablecloth, garment-
center restaurant
owned by her family,
waiters would wink
and twirl her napkin
overhead and place it
on her lap with a
grand flourish.
If she'd order a
hamburger, her
grandfather would be
sure to grind the meat
himself in the kitchen. Meanwhile, her father was
up front, greeting customers like old friends. To
Volk and her family who owned several restaurants
around New York City, Morgen's was "the store."
With chapter tides like "Chopped Liver,"
"Fricasee," "Hersheyettes," "Meat Loaf" and
"Chocolate Pudding," Volk's memoir, Stuffed:
Adventures of a Restaurant Family, is a book that con-
jures up a slice of Manhattan in the 1940s and '50s.
It's less a personal memoir than a portrait of the
extended Jewish family that lived between
Riverside Drive and West End Avenue on the
Upper West Side. Everyday meals at the author's
grandparents' apartment involved four generations
and five courses.
Many ethnic groups share Jews' love of eating and
its twin pursuit, talking about food. In recent years,
a new genre of food literature has developed; these
are not cookbooks but works in which food is writ-
ten about as adventure, as a tool of remembering.
Volk's Stuffed stands out in its splendid weaving
together of food, family, memory and love.
The book's title comes from what Volk refers to as
a restaurant family's penchant for hyperbole. They'd
never be hungry but starving and, at the end of a
meal, never full but unable to move, stuffed.
Volk, the author of a novel, White Light, and two
collections of short stories, All It Takes and The
Yellow Banana, writes with humor, although it seems
clear that she's starting out with great material.
Her paternal great-grandfather Sussman Volk
introduced pastrami to America. Her maternal
grandfather, Herman Morgen (shortened from
Morgenbesser), was the first person to slice meat in a
restaurant window, attracting crowds and customers.
Her grandmother Polly, voted "Best Legs in
Atlantic City, 1916," bought a new mink coat every
year, and always used her tea bags twice.
"You are who you come from," Volk writes.
"There is no escape, but there is transmutation.
Family is how you become who you will be.

Thumbing through
Marge Piercy's memoir,
I briefly wondered if
the author should have
titled it Sleeping with
Katz. Scanning the
book, my eye fell on
paragraph after para-
graph detailing her sex-
ual encounters, her
years-long open mar-
riage, her mother's atti-
tude toward sexuality.
A longtime Piercy
fan, I worried that read-
ing Sleeping with Cats
would be somewhat akin to visiting a sausage factory:
better to enjoy the product, i.e. the author's superb body
of work, than to witness what went into its making.
Having now read and not just perused the book, I've
come to realize that Piercy is as fearless in her autobiog-
raphy as she has been in her poetry and fiction.
Author of 15 books of poetry, and as many novels,
among them He, She, It; Vida; and Woman on the
Edge of Time, Piercy calls the period of life that
inspired her memoir a "sort of High Holidays of the
soul in which I judge what I've done and left
undone."
Daughter of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish
father, Piercy grew up in Detroit, living if not hand to
mouth, than with little margin for ease and few funds
for extras. Her parents' marriage was a match made in
hell, and early on Piercy's saviors were her books and
the stray felines that sauntered into her life.
Cats wend their sleek way through this memoir as well.
Political causes, lovers, husbands come and go, but
Piercy's cats are a constant. Their presence in her life
appears in the main text of the book and in some of
the poems that close each chapter.
Their capricious lives and poignant deaths loom
every bit as large as the other characters who have
shared the eclectic stage that is Marge Piercy's life.
Happily married now to the novelist Ira Wood,
Piercy, a woman on the edge of 65 and suffering the
ills of age, "imagined that writing a memoir would
be easy; I was mistaken. It has proved as hard as eat-
ing bricks for breakfast."
The girl who joined a street gang in Detroit, the
student who won a full scholarship to the University
of Michigan, the writer whose life is consumed by
her craft allows that "writing is a futile attempt to
preserve what disappears moment by moment.
"So long as people read, those we loved survive how-
ever evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life's
work, Remember. Remember us. Remember me."
In Living with Cats, Piercy has done it again —
given her fans an unforgettable work.

— Sandee Brawarsky

— Debra B. Darvick

SIcep v \ i T
fia ts

HOME LANDS: PORTRAITS OF THE
NEW JEWISH DIASPORA

By Larry Tye
(Henry Holt; 307 pp.; $27.50)

"There were not
supposed to be any
Jews left in
Dnepropetrovsk,"
journalist Larry Tye
writes.
In this city in
Ukraine, the Cossacks
massacred Jews and
burnt synagogues 350
years ago, and the
Nazis continued in
their path, murdering
LARRY TYE
20,000 Jews. -
More recently, the
Soviets shuttered 42
of 43 synagogues; many remaining Jews immigrated
to Israel, the United States and Germany.
But today, as Tye describes in Home Lands:
Portraits of the New Jewish Diaspora, tens of thou-
sands of Jews are reclaiming Jewish traditions in
the city. In the last 10 years, they. have built a
Jewish day school and the first Jewish old-age
home in the former Soviet Union. They have
begun a program for troubled Jewish youth and a
weekly Jewish television program; rebuilt a syna-
gogue that houses 2,000 people for the High
Holidays; and are now constructing a Jewish med-
ical center and Jewish community center.
Dnepropetrovsk is one of seven cities that Tye
profiles in his book; all are places where he char-
acterizes Jewish life as full of energy and vitality.
For each, he provides a brief history and recounts
the story, with a journalist's eye for telling details,
of renewed Jewish life through a particular family
or congregation.
In Boston he uses his own family's story. He
also describes Dusseldorf — readers may be sur-
prised to learn that Germany has the fastest-grow-
ing Jewish population in the world — and
Buenos Aires, Dublin, Paris and Atlanta.
And why not New York? Tye says the story of
New York is well known and often told, and he
wanted to focus on places people know less about.
Home Lands was inspired in part by Bernard
Wasserstein's 1996 book, The Vanishing Diaspora,
which offered a bleak forecast on European Jewry.
Tye takes an optimistic point of view.
A former reporter for the Boston Globe who
would frequently report on Jewish communities
around the world when he traveled for the news-
paper, he found that the statistics that others
reported on were only part of the story— rand
here he tells the rest. "We may end up with fewer
Jews," he says, "but we'll end up with better
Jews."

,

— Sandee Brawarsky

NONFICTION on page 78

6/28
2002

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