The price paid for a misspent youth differs wildly--some mortgage a promising future, some age into maturity unscathed--but the recompense for immature life choices seems especially cruel for Mary Lifton, the subject of My Mother's Wars. Lifton, a Jewish garment industry worker who emigrated to New York City from Latvia, suffered from a crushing guilt in her later years, convinced that her indulgence in the pleasures available to a working girl in the city frittered away the opportunity to bring the rest of her family to America and save them from the Holocaust.
Lillian Faderman (Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers) slips gracefully into Lifton's skin, reconstructing, reimagining and meticulously reanalyzing to produce an intimate and searching biography of her mother--and the doomed affair from which Faderman was conceived. This is a beautifully told story of a complex but winning heroine, full of rich period detail, from Lifton's arrival in 1914 to her city life in the '30s. Yet as Faderman lingers appreciatively over her mother's sensual nature and her inability to know, really, how badly things are going in Europe, she is also screaming through history at her mother to wake up.
Of course, Faderman wrenchingly acknowledges that if her mother hadn't made her particular foolish choices, she herself never would have been born. The impossibility and inevitability of looking back in this way make My Mother's Wars a haunting and mesmerizing story of an all-too-human young woman whose world was crushed by an overwhelming evil that gave no quarter or second chances. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic