Community Update

Perhaps I should say something about what is in my flier that makes people respond so readily to it.
What I do is explain that my memoir, “Mother and Me: Escape from Warsaw 1939” begins with a chapter about my early life in pre WW II Poland. I tell that, as was customary in upper middle class families, I was brought up by a nanny, leaving my parents free to pursue their social life. And, because my beautiful mother and handsome stepfather were the toast of Warsaw society, they only existed at the periphery of my reality.
The center of my reality, the only parent figure that I recognized, was my nanny, Miss Jane, whom, for some unknown reason, I called Kiki. She and I shared a room in which we both slept and ate our meals and in which we generally kept out of sight when my parents were around. But, while my parents and I were Jewish, Kiki was a highly devout Roman Catholic who had been taught by the Good Sisters that only Catholics went to Heaven.
Well, while Kiki took great care that she, herself, reach that destination with as few impediments along the way as possible, she was also greatly concerned with the final disposition of my immortal soul. And so, she taught me to recite the Our Father, the Hail Mary, to put them together in the rosary, to perform the Sign of the Cross and to tip my hat when passing a church. The idea was that after a long life of piety, my Jewishness might be overlooked.
Then, on the second day of WW II, Kiki disappeared from my life, returning to her parents in Lodz, and I was confronted with the virtual stranger who was my beautiful, socialite mother, Barbara. This was the beginning of an eighteen-month odyssey to safety in America in which Mother would prove both resourceful and courageous. What she unfortunately never got the hang of was that quality called nurturing, and the bombing, the Soviet occupation, escape over the Carpathian Mountains, playing hide-and-seek with authorities in Nazi-sympathizing Hungary all took a second seat behind my struggle for breath under Mother’s suffocating ego and her readiness to ride roughshod over other people.
What my flier does not say, of course, is that, while Mother was the cause of much grief in my childhood and early adulthood, now that I’m a writer of memoir and fiction, it’s pure gold. It’s my Mother Load which I have mined for three memoirs and two novels, currently in print, and have not stopped digging yet.