Interrogating Memory

Everybody has great stories to tell once they "interrogate memory." Those Dr. Berger tells in this timely, innovative and entertaining book began with "Why do you love film noir?"
The answer starts with four Jewish families leaving the western fringes of the Russian Empire between 1893 and 1912, eventually settling in the "city within a city" of West Philadelphia. Two sons of these families – a successful merchant and a police officer during film noir's classic era – marry two daughters of these families. The merchant's son marries the police officer's daughter as that era ends in 1960. In 1965, they move to the suburbs, where they adopt a boy in utero.
Dr. Berger then interrogates his own "origin story," which involves the Freemasons, Drexel University and a powerful city official. After a data-driven reevaluation of film noir itself, successive chapters mark Dr. Berger's film noir "personal journey" milestones: detective fiction, Charlie Chan, the "dark city" and cinematic freedom.
Sprinkled throughout the narrative are tales – often funny, sometimes heartbreaking, always true – Dr. Berger learned while writing this book. They include tragic and untimely deaths, a brazen kidnapping, fires of suspicious origin…and that time wife caught husband in the hotel room with her cousin. Dr. Berger's own life story foregrounds themes of alienation, mental illness, critical thinking and control (or lack thereof) – as well as those of love, acceptance and joyous exploration.
Uniting all of these stories is the idea of "interrogating memory": carefully assessing all available information with the humility to be proven incorrect. Dr. Berger let go of a few cherished stories, including "The Dancing Rabbi of Shpola," but what he learned along the way more than made up for it.
Because just as truth is often stranger than fiction, the interrogated memory is even more often superior to the original.