1185 Park Avenue
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- USD 13.99
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- USD 13.99
Descripción editorial
In this captivating memoir, novelist Anne Roiphe shows us what it was really like to grow up rich and Jewish in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. Revisiting the world of her childhood, Roiphe brings alive a cast of characters who are both difficult to love and impossible to forget. Through the eyes of this precocious, loving daughter, we witness the brutalities that lurked behind the mah-jongg tables, cocktail parties, and summer houses of her family. By turns heartbreaking, funny, and mercilessly honest, Roiphe's story exposes the fault lines of misery that exploded in domestic battles on the home front, far overshadowing the war overseas.
The locus of the story is 1185 Park Avenue. It is one of the buildings on the northern end of the avenue -- just before the train tracks mark the beginning of Harlem -- that wealthy Jewish families claimed as their own in the first half of the 20th century. Amidst the maids and the governesses and the doormen and the psychiatrists live the members of the Roth family, in Apartment 8C. They include an unfaithful father who uses his wife's fortune to entertain other women and play cards at his club; a misfit son who won't eat his food because he believes his parents are trying to poison him; a disappointed mother who waits all day for her five o'clock scotch and her crossword puzzle; and an eager daughter who tries to negotiate peace at the dinner table. Bound by custom and greed, as well as love, they stay together until their world at 1185 Park has done its damage. Only the daughter escapes whole -- to become the writer we now know as Anne Roiphe.
1185 Park Avenue is both a history of an era and a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Roiphe makes it impossible for us to view the 1940s and 1950s with unabashed nostalgia or to think the same way about the people who were crushed by its lies and deceptions. Her redemption, though bittersweet, stands as a haunting triumph long after we have turned the last page of her compelling story.
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A noted author of fiction (her 1970 Up the Sandbox was a landmark portrayal of women's motherhood and career conflicts) as well as nonfiction (Fruitful was a 1996 National Book Award finalist), Roiphe recalls growing up in a loveless household marked by petty bitterness and fueled by murderous rage. Outwardly, it was a world of privilege, endowed by the fortune of Israel Phillips, her maternal grandfather, the founder of the Phillips Van Heusen shirt company. The family's wealth attracted a tall, handsome husband for Israel's daughter Blanche, but the union was miserable. Anne's mother was prey to neurotic insecurities that were resistant to lifelong psychiatric counseling, and she became a chain-smoking semi-invalid. Like her philandering husband, Blanche displayed little interest in the children, who were consigned to the care of a stern German governess. In this surprising and gripping memoir, Roiphe unflinchingly describes her savage jealousy at the birth of her brother and the anger that always underlay their relationship. Her extended family circle included Roy Cohn, whose attempt to fix Anne up for a blind date with his colleague David Schine's younger brother provides one of the book's lighter moments. She describes with telling detail her passage to adulthood, but the story of her inner journey--how she managed to escape the destructive atmosphere of her home and become a celebrated novelist and critic-- remains a puzzle. Nevertheless Roiphe's devastating memoir fully engages the reader in her painful story of hatred and betrayal.
