Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning journalist, author and Columbia University professor. Perhaps more importantly, he was also a devoted son.
Freedman’s mother, Eleanor, was a vain, beautiful and complex woman who died of cancer in 1974 at age 50, when her son was only 19.
While he went on to a distinguished career, Freedman never fully got over his mother’s death; never had a chance to develop a mature relationship with her and find out what made her tick.
But he set about trying to understand her the only way he could: by recovering the details of her lost history. The results are in Freedman’s new book, “Who She Was: My Search For My Mother’s Life,” which was published in April.
Though he and his mother were close, he approached the chronicling of her life as if writing a biography of a remote historical figure.
“I first thought about doing this years ago,” says Freedman, who will be in the Bay Area next week speaking about his book. “I was always tormented by 1974, by the deathwatch, and into my 20s and 30s I filled up several stenographer’s pads with scribbled down memories. [Over time] it became more urgent to know the truth.”
The truth was that Eleanor Freedman typified those first generation Jewish Americans whose parents had fled poverty and oppression in Europe. The new young Americans embraced freedom, questioned allegiance to Jewish religious practice and set about building the American Century.
But Eleanor Freedman was not merely a type. Her son discovered she was a unique individual who impacted family, friends and lovers, even though she never made the evening news.
“I saw the strains of the Jewish immigrant experience present in her story,” he says. “The conflicts over assimilation, the effect of the war, the loss of relatives in the Holocaust, interfaith marriage, all were present.”
Eleanor grew up the daughter of a socialist father and a more traditional (and domineering) Jewish mother. She became an excellent student and was valedictorian of her Brooklyn high school graduating class. But, as Freedman points out, her life “peaked at age 17.”
From then on, Eleanor’s life was a slide into disappointment and adherence to prescribed roles, just missing out on the feminist revolution that might have opened doors for her.
He compares her to “Moses looking into the Promised Land. She could see what the future was going to be like [for women]. She was a wonderful, loving, involved, creative supporting mother, but that’s not what she wanted her life to be. She wanted to be a microbiologist.”
Most of Freedman’s book covers the years before he was born, which required him to interview family members, former boyfriends and others that once orbited his mother’s life.
“It’s harder when someone didn’t leave collected papers to the Library of Congress,” he says. “But people do leave evidence. I was trying to find the people who knew her and find the paper trail.”
Some of that evidence included stories of his mother’s lusty past, subject matter that could make some sons a bit squeamish. Not Freedman, though.
“When I talked to her boyfriends and guys she felt attracted to, that didn’t give me a sense of weirdness at all,” notes the author. “My mother was proud of her attractiveness. Losing that was the hardest part of her cancer. Being attracted to men was a life force.”
Today, Freedman reversed the course of his parents and is an observant Jew. As a writer, he has often been attracted to Jewish subjects, and won a National Jewish Book Award in 2001 for “Jew Vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry.”
In his new book he creates an undemonstrative hero of his mother, someone who stands for all of the Jewish women of the last century that helped establish the Jewish success story in America.
“Beyond the specifically Jewish part,” he says, “There’s the idea of the greatest generation, which is always used as an exclusively male undertaking. The story of my mother is the female counterpart of the Greatest Generation.”
Samuel G. Freedman will be making several appearances in the Bay Area, including: 7:30 p.m. Monday, June 20, at Congregation Netivot Shalom, 1316 University Ave., Berkeley. Information: (510)528-3467. He will appear 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 21, at the JCCSF, 3200 California St. Information: (415) 346-6040. Also 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 22, at Congregation Kol Shofar, 215 Blackfield Drive, Tiburon. Information: (415) 388-1818 ext. 18.
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