Unmoored lives move through author’s short stories

Friday, August 2, 2002 | by

JOSHUA BRANDT

Two of the themes reappearing throughout Professor Maxine Chernoff's recently released collection of short stories are anonymity and cultural displacement.

In fact, many of the characters in "Some of Her Friends that Year" take a similar path to the author's own life by moving from the West Coast to the East Coast—or from a place where identity is more concrete to a place where it is much more fluid.

Chernoff, now living in Mill Valley, grew up in Chicago in a Reform household, where her father was vice president of the synagogue the family attended. Although Chernoff, a professor at San Francisco State University and the chair of its creative writing program, doesn't necessarily view herself as a Jewish writer, she does identify strongly with her culture.

"Some of Her Friends that Year" does not reflect her Jewish heritage.

"My Judaism isn't the first thing I think about when I write," she said, "but it's definitely there. Some of the writers I really admire, such as Grace Paley, are writers that really embrace the social activism side of Judaism.

"I think that being Jewish is like living a classic Country and Western song—full of heartbreak and constant battles. Except the Jewish narrative has more upward mobility than the typical country song."

Most of the characters that inhabit the book are going through tumultuous events—dissolving marriages, distant chldren and the ennui that permeates everyday life. The author's prose is compact, and often laced with pop-cultural references.

One story that summarizes Chernoff's take on the West Coast-East Coast dichotomy is titled "Jeopardy," after the popular game show. The story concerns an unnamed daughter (most of Chernoff's characters are anonymous) who tries to jog her "Jeopardy"-obsessed mother's memory about whether she grew up with the writer Saul Bellow.

When the mother responds that she grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn (and that a lot of guys were named "Saul,") the daughter refuses to relent:

"You could do better to think about something important, maybe," the mother says.

"It was important to me whether you knew him, that you both lived on Cortez. I was excited about it," the daughter responds.

"OK, he was my best friend," the mother says. "We sat in the big elm together. The city's probably chopped it down by now. We sang songs. One summer I taught him how to read. Boy, he was a smart cookie. About the time his mother died, he took comfort in my arms."

The mother's sarcastic comments aside, the story reflects Chernoff's fascination with people's lives that have become unmoored, whether due to geography, fate, luck or the banal cruelties of existence.

"Most of my stories concern the circumstances of people who are in their 40s and 50s," Chernoff said. "I'm concerned with their triumphs and failures, because their struggles reflect the people I know, and the struggles of my peer group."

The mother of twin 17-year-old boys, Chernoff said it wasn't mere coincidence that many of her characters living on the West Coast feel lack of established roots.

"In California, nobody's really a native," she said. "Most of the people in the Bay Area come here to begin a new life, or to escape an old one."