Therefore Choose Life

Greenberg, Joanne

Therefore Choose Life The Blessing and the Curse by Linda Bayer The Jewish Publication Society, 1988 221 pp., $16.95 Reviewed by Joanne Greenberg Ida Morgan-Weiss, professor, separated from her...

...Ida was adopted...
...She is literate and well-traveled...
...Her ex-husband, never more than a shadow, has disappeared into memory unmourned, and Ida has emerged stronger than ever and did it without trashing any of the men in her life or missing a class...
...Go to Vegas...
...Money is not a worry and her work is stimulating and a challenge...
...She has had no experience of pregnancy or motherhood—and the clock is ticking...
...Ida is shown teaching, really teaching...
...Person to person...
...She wants to help them learn and she sees them grow throughout the term so that at the end she knows their weaknesses and strengths...
...Call him collect from a dive in Rangoon...
...Therefore Choose Life The Blessing and the Curse by Linda Bayer The Jewish Publication Society, 1988 221 pp., $16.95 Reviewed by Joanne Greenberg Ida Morgan-Weiss, professor, separated from her husband who has found a younger woman, comes to Ruston to start a new life...
...But the Blessing part is also very strong and includes excellent writing and some long awaited, joyfully welcome scenes...
...I wish women in feminist books and stories didn't have to prove and keep proving how wonderful they are, how steady their friendships, how deep and enduring their networks, what good daughters and what wonderful mothers they are as they carefully choose motherhood for all the fashionably acceptable reasons...
...I found these scenes as endearing as they are rare in much of the fiction set in schools and universities...
...You only go around once...
...This graces the book...
...The liturgical year has meaning for her and the prayers speak in her and are a deep part of her search...
...a good friend, Rose, the quintessential support system...
...She understands enough Hebrew to have it set its resonances in her and because she seems never to have been afraid or ashamed of her Judaism, her acceptance of it is unforced and natural...
...I wish they didn't have to be so concerned, so caring, so carefully symbolic, so carefully loving, with the obligatory sex scenes now given us to prove that oh, yes, they are good in bed, too...
...She has a mother with whom there is ambivalent but strong contact...
...There were moments when only the quality of the writing kept me from the fruity taste of incipient diabetes...
...Ida has not had children with her ex-husband...
...But there are shadows also...
...Ida is an admirable woman— a mensch...
...The sequence gives us paternalism at its most virulent and I saw in the anger and righteous passion of it, the writer Bayer can become if only she lets her characters breathe a little in their corsets...
...She neither flaunts or disparages...
...The bureaucrats are drawn with a pen of acid and Ida's carefully pre-planned tactics are twice useless...
...For me this was the Curse part...
...Loosen up, Ida...
...Someone else stands, unseen, in the background...
...She is confident in her relationships and at home in the world...
...She struggles over what she will tell her students and grieves that they might find what she says banal when it is not, or obfuscatory when it is not...
...The truest part of The Blessing and the Curse comes toward the middle of the quest when Ida goes to get her original birth certificate, a right which has just then been mandated by Connecticut law...
...Ida is also shown praying, really praying, in—of all places—a synagogue...
...Sic the IRS on your ex...
...The woman she tries to bring into a cultural understanding of the New Feminism is not her natural mother...
...She likes her classes and loves her subject...
...By the end of The Blessing and the Curse, Ida has had a lover, or lovers, has gone to Israel and tracked down her natural mother, has made peace with the disapproval of her family and is triumphantly pregnant...
...Everyone in Ida's life, even the stranger who picks her up in Jerusalem, speaks without raising his or her voice, flosses, and accepts unquestioningly everyone else's right to personhood unconditionally loved and loving...

Vol. 13 • October 1988 • No. 7


 
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