The Girl in the Middle
Growing Up Between Black and White, Rich and Poor
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A moving and vivid memoir of a young girl—long before her starring role in the Degrassi series—who was always switching between worlds, wanting only to be loved
When Anais Granofsky’s parents meet in the early 1970s, they are foreign and fascinating to each other. Stanley is the son of a very wealthy Toronto Jewish family; Jean is one of fifteen children from a poor Black Methodist family, direct descendants of the freed Randolph slaves. When Jean becomes pregnant at nineteen, Stanley doesn’t anticipate being cut off by his parents. Nor does the couple anticipate that Stanley, soon to rename himself Fakeer, will find his calling in the spiritual teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh on an ashram in India.
The Girl in the Middle is the story of a child who spends her life navigating between two very different worlds. Alone, Anais and her mother teetered on the poverty line, sharing a mattress in a single room in social housing in Toronto, while her grandparents lived a twenty-minute car ride away on the mansion-lined Bridle Path. As Anais grows up, she spends weekends having lunch with her grandmother by the pool, while during the week, she and her mother often don’t know where their next meal will come from, even after Fakeer’s return. Anais realizes that if she wants to be loved, she has to switch identities to please each of the adult women in her family. It isn’t until she gets a role in the TV series Degrassi Junior High that Anais finds a third world—her own—and begins to define an identity for herself.
The Girl in the Middle offers a powerful lens to explore how two families, one white and one Black, faced systemic oppression spanning multiple generations and came out at opposite economic classes—and how they clashed when they shared a granddaughter.
With compassion and vivid storytelling, Granofsky shares her experience of living in opposite worlds, and demonstrates how generational shame, grief and prejudice ultimately lead to love and forgiveness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Degrassi Junior High star Granofsky reflects on her coming-of-age between "radically different" worlds in this heartfelt and candid debut. Born in 1973 to a white Jewish father and Black mother, Granofsky relates how her family bounced from rural Ohio to California to Canada until her father left her and her mother for life at an Indian ashram, when she was five. On their own, Granofsky and her mother were "stalked by poverty," until her paternal grandmother began taking Granofsky in on the weekends, immersing her in a world of lavish social clubs and shopping trips. After her father returned in 1983 and found his own place, Granofsky split her time between three households she kept distinct—"I felt the imperative to shift who I was to accommodate the person I was with." As she reveals, this "code-switching" became her secret weapon when she began acting and, at age 13, was cast in the hit TV series Degrassi Junior High. "It felt... exhilarating and I was getting paid!" While the pacing sometimes sags, her story of finding power in her unique perspective, and later building her own family, is immensely inspiring. "Sometimes I think of my ancestors who... bore the brunt of racism and anti-Semitism," she writes. "I wonder what they would think of my beautiful Canadian life." It's a touching ode to hard-fought happiness.
Customer Reviews
Fascinating!
Do you remember Lucy in Degrassi? Turns out she’s Anais Granofsky a Canadian actor of mixed raced from 2 different worlds. Her story is pretty interesting as she comes from a rich Jewish family from her dad side of the family. Rich enough to have helped bring the NBA Raptors team to Toronto. Her mom side from the family is poor Black farmers from OHIO. Anais parents met by chance at the university both trying to escape the destiny set by their families. Her mother trying to escape poverty by getting an education and her father by trying to escape the obligations that comes from a family of wealth. The birth of Anais altered both their destinies indefinitely. Anais described well in this book the contrast of having to navigate both these world as a matter of class and culture. I find it fascinating that while both families were immigrants ( one Eastern European Jews and the other descendants of slaves) in America/Canada and had discrimination both had different fate because one is able to be white passing in society. Her book is really great as she describes very well both communities and how she’s made peace with the contradictions of class and culture.