His­to­ry is often viewed through the eyes of the pow­er­ful, and,until recent­ly, the pow­er­ful have over­whelm­ing­ly been men. In Meryl Ain’s linked short sto­ry col­lec­tion Remem­ber To Eat and Oth­er Sto­ries, his­to­ry is viewed through the lens of one small fam­i­ly and the women who hold it togeth­er. Span­ning World War II, Octo­ber 7, and even the near future, the sto­ry top­ics range in sub­ject mat­ter from dis­putes over the mem­bers of a wed­ding par­ty to glob­al anti­semitism and COVID ‑19. 

As we watch Alice and her daugh­ter Mar­jorie move through his­to­ry, read­ers see how mile­stone events can affect the every­day peo­ple liv­ing through them. This is not the ana­lyt­ic stuff of his­to­ry texts; Ain con­veys her obser­va­tions through the nit­ty-grit­ty details of lives of a Jew­ish woman and her fam­i­ly being buf­fet­ed about by cur­rent events. Ain also includes small yet cru­cial pieces of infor­ma­tion about the inner work­ings of Amer­i­can Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties. Telling­ly, Marjorie’s daugh­ter Deb­o­rah is not giv­en a sto­ry from her own view­point. Watch­ing her through Marjorie’s eyes allows the read­er to see just how much a woman’s role in soci­ety has changed, and how lit­tle we under­stand each other’s strug­gles across gen­er­a­tions. Hot top­ics like vac­ci­na­tion and cam­pus protests run along­side long­stand­ing women’s issues like sex­ism in the work­place, bal­anc­ing a career and moth­er­hood, and mar­riage equality.

The sto­ries are not told in chrono­log­i­cal order. Instead, they are arranged to allow the read­er to hop from the seri­ous to the light-heart­ed. Read­ers will rage at the anti­semitism expe­ri­enced by a col­lege stu­dent fol­low­ing Octo­ber 7th, gig­gle at the ridicu­lous­ness of a hus­band clue­less as to how to sup­port his labor­ing wife, strug­gle with the envy of a friend reach­ing a mile­stone the char­ac­ters wish they them­selves could achieve, cry over the con­cen­tra­tion camps, delight in new romance, iso­late for the pan­dem­ic, and won­der why every­body texts instead of call­ing — all in one sit­ting. Remem­ber To Eat and Oth­er Sto­ries is a book that reminds read­ers that the uni­ver­sal is often also intense­ly per­son­al. It gives a win­dow into not only the lives of an Amer­i­can Jew­ish fam­i­ly, but also the times and soci­ety in which that fam­i­ly lives.