The Junk Dealer's Daughter—A Leben, Nisht Farendikt

Literary Nonfiction. Jewish Studies. Memoir. In an "interrupted" memoir of growing up in an immigrant Jewish family in Appleton, Wisconsin, through the Forties and Fifties, the late Sarah Blacher Cohen first takes us back to the White Russian village where her parents met amidst pogroms and her father's arrest for avoiding the Czar's army, their hairbreadth escape to America, her father's workaday world in Appleton—it included meeting with friends at the Merrytime Tavern, much to his wife's consternation—the respect he gained in Appleton's Jewish community, and some of the seminal influences that launched Sarah herself into the literary and academic world. Sadly, THE JUNK DEALER'S DAUGHTER stops abruptly, as if in mid-sentence; yet Sarah has evoked a time and place that is at the same time a homage to the diverse influences of family and community that go into shaping who we ourselves become.