New York City life can be writ large or small, and both can be affecting and colorful. Steven Schrader chooses to tell his very personal stories from the vantage point of individual experience, but the fact that they translate so seamlessly to the universal in this memoir speaks eloquently about their relevance to lives lived outside his immediate world. Threads spans Schrader’s childhood playing sports in the local schoolyard, serving in the military, making career choices and changing them numerous times, trying to make peace with his parents, and building a family of his own. From working in his father’s dress business, to serving as a welfare office investigator and a junior high school teacher and then an author, Schrader creates a dimensional portrait of the indelible impact of early friendships and family relationships, plus the scars of adolescence that follow us all into adulthood.
This slim book is both a set of stories and a collection of memories about the author’s adventures, both internal and external. In it he demonstrates the presence of a strong inner voice, one that speaks to the reader about what he is observing and how he feels about it at the same time. Insightful and funny, this internal dialogue meshes with his outer experiences to provide both deep and wacky riffs on society as he saw it. His finely structured interior world plays a rich role in his relationship with his father, for example, a man who is powerful and moneyed, yet absent, and his lonely, abandoned mother, for whom he feels a major sense of responsibility.
Schrader writes like a person who believes in himself, but one who maintains a strong connection to a younger self still struggling for acceptance and confidence. This combination creates a welcome level of complexity to the reminiscences, autobiographical sketches and descriptions of his experiences as he grew up with New York City during several tumultuous decades.
Linda F. Burghardt is a New York-based journalist and author who has contributed commentary, breaking news, and features to major newspapers across the U.S., in addition to having three non-fiction books published. She writes frequently on Jewish topics and is now serving as Scholar-in-Residence at the Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Nassau County.
