A Mother's Steps

.

A Mother's Steps: A Meditation on Silence is a novelist's attempt to understand through photographs, interviews memory and dream, a mother reluctant to talk about herself. During Ruth (Lessler) Mirsky's final illness at fifty-six, much of her characteristic reserve fell away after learning that she was dangerously ill. The book tries to un-riddle the silence that Ruth S. Mirsky drew over her childhood, adolescence and the first years of her marriage. She remained a mystery to her son after her death at the age of fifty-six in April of 1968. Why had she spoken so little about her own mother and never about her father? The subject had been taboo while she was alive and even Ruth's husband, Wilfred, the author's father, was puzzled when asked. 

Spending many hours beside her bed in the hospital through her last six months brought her son together with his mother in ways that he had never expected. Ruth was born into an immigrant family of twelve, the only one of six sisters to go to college. Graduating Simmons, she went to work in an orphanage, supervised social workers throughout New England for the Federal Government, went to Ohio with the Red Cross for the flood of 1937, and served in many public capacities including a term on the Industrial Accident Board of Massachusetts. While proud of his mother's public life, her son also felt, however, her reluctance to show affection. Twenty-nine at his mother's death, it changed the author's understanding of reality and fiction. It led to his immersion in Orthodox Jewish prayer as he mourned his mother and experienced her return to him in the world of dreams.

Scanning her albums carefully, the notes she wrote beside them, thinking about photographs that she did not include in their pages revealed much of what she had kept private. They contradicted the previous picture her son had of Ruth, and explained something of the last years of her life when she reached toward him past her self-imposed boundaries. This book tries to construct a new portrait of his mother, asking questions the author might have, if he had known her better.