The twenty-five stories collected in Someone Should Know This Story, which originally appeared in various literary journals and popular magazines over the past sixty years, offer a testament to the sustained creative achievement of Merrill Joan Gerber. Not as well-known as her contemporary Cynthia Ozick (among Gerber’s admirers), this deeply moving collection showcases Gerber’s penetrating psychological portraits of Jewish family life in transition. Her subject is the enclaved world of Jewish-saturated, lower middle-class Brooklyn at mid-century; later stories are set in a sunnier, if still fraught, Jewish émigré world of Los Angeles. On either coast, however, the battle between Jewish generations remains a constant, an emotional struggle driven by archaic grievances that can never be forgotten, let alone assuaged.
Gerber’s ultimate subject is women who feel suffocated by Jewish family life: they seek liberation from the incessant monitoring of their lives by desperate immigrant parents. Gerber’s women simultaneously struggle with the bewildering world of emerging adolescent sexual consciousness and are often overwhelmed by the pressures of marriage and motherhood. Above all, Gerber’s women are trailed by inescapable pasts, haunted by enigmatic memories that remain unresolved. These dilemmas inflect Gerber’s richest character, “Anna Goldman” — seemingly a stand-in for the author’s own mother — who appears as the key figure in a sequence of linked stories. Anna remains driven by grievance; in response she dreams of escaping a world felt as tawdry and spiritually constraining. With her critical eye and sharp tongue, she is Gerber’s most compelling figure.
In a previous story about Anna, “A Daughter of My Own” (which appeared in Redbook in 1964), Gerber dramatizes one of her tonic themes: the irresolvable, tangled bond between a daughter seeking autonomy and a mother whose presence in the daughter’s life is both overbearing and emotionally necessary. The first-person narrator, thrilled by motherhood, understands her own mother’s consuming need to help out with the newborn. Early in the story, we learn that the mother figures in the daughter’s memory as a symbol of salvation. Frequently sick during her youth, the daughter recalls that “during those frightening years when doctors loomed everywhere, the grip of my mother’s fingers when needles were piercing my very soul was all that sustained me.”
But soon after the mother arrives, that sustaining “grip” becomes intrusive, ultimately a potential threat to the couple’s marriage, and thus their future. In the end, the mother, deep in grief and rejection, leaves her daughter to return home: at the airport “we embraced desperately,” the distraught daughter confesses; her eyes follow her mother “through the gate, her head down, her hand to her eyes.” With this image, we witness a dilemma at the core of much of Gerber’s work: Neither daughter nor mother can let go of a past that continues to bind, yet the cord must be cut in order for the daughter to move on. In the end, we are left with an image of irresolvable grief and filial guilt that cannot be salved.
Subsequent interlinked stories focus on episodes of personal crisis, sexual awakening, and Anna’s orbiting resentment and fierce indignation as she seeks a way of being in a world that she experiences as intrusive and soul-deadening. As the sequence unfolds, we follow Anna on her life journey, beginning in immigrant Brooklyn, where she had no privacy as a newlywed. “My mother was passionate about privacy,” her daughter Janet explains; a later story reveals the origin of Anna’s passion, birthed by a startling scene of shame (an old world mother barging in on the newlyweds’ sexual activity). In stories like “Tabu” and “Goodbye, Arny Goldstone,” Janet shares her own memories of unsettling sexual awakening, associated, like her mother’s, with an unhappy Brooklyn childhood.
The richest story sequence in Someone Should Know This Story follows Anna over her last few years to, literally, her dying days. Gerber invites us into Anna’s omniscient stream of consciousness over a lifetime. She plays piano at a senior center, and thinks deeply about the arc of her own life. In “Anna Gets Wings,” she is even present at her own funeral, overhearing and commenting on the eulogies voiced by her daughters. Anna thus revisits the key turning points of her own history, resolving the enigmas of the past. In the end, Anna understands what has determined her story: “Her life energy had been powered by fury.”
“I understand the Jewish psyche,” Gerber once observed in an interview. “My dreams are Jewish.” Viewed together, Gerber’s stories richly map the Jewish American experience during the mid-twentieth century.
Donald Weber writes about Jewish American literature and popular culture. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Mohegan Lake, NY.
