Written by Jennifer K. Lader
January 14, 2009
Review of In My Mother’s House by Stephanie Kaplan Cohen
Stephanie Kaplan Cohen kept me asking one question throughout this book — why did she write the memoir? I found the answer to the mystery on the very last page. Cohen blames her mother, and particularly the house that her mother bought, for causing her father to leave the family.
The book catalogues many leaks, but most are not from poor plumbing. We hear of the drainage from the children’s infected ears (page 47), plenty of “snot” (pages 6, 28, 91), and melting ice pops (page 35). Most of the females cry from time to time. Bleeding occurs — from the badly skinned knees, to menstruation, to the unfortunate neighbor girl in one of the opening stories. Cohen vomits or mentions vomit several times in the course of this memoir (pages 64, 106). But more than that, Cohen seems to spew the vignettes themselves, mainly dealing with the misdeeds or anger of her mother, one after the other, onto the page. I see the vomit as rage and the bleeding as pain. Cohen expresses her rage and her pain.
The adult author does not seem to distance herself or in any way empathize with her mother. Yet, the only person who takes on three dimensions in the book is Cohen’s mother, Augusta. The events relating to Margaret’s illness reveal Augusta’s compassion and determination (page 48). Her seemingly hard-hearted comments to Cohen reveal her own difficult yet ambitious path. She raised her husband’s illegitimate child apparently treating her as her own, and not without difficulties — rickets, lice, and getting blamed for the psychological affects of the abuse the child received as an infant from the birth mother (page 94). Augusta had many faults as a mother, but Cohen showed me what to admire, too.
In what I found to be the best scene in the book, Augusta prepares to give her husband the monthly bills by preparing a lavish meal and dressing herself well, then faces her husband. This was the first enjoyable scene in the book. It begins on page 103 and goes on longer than most of the book’s vignettes.
The bill paying scene fleshed out Cohen's father more than any other. Before that he had been a moody presence recovering from a stressful workday. He was a Jewish man with an annual card game on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement (page 111). He was the occasionally manic provider of a day filled with an excess of treats and outings that left the children sick to their stomachs (page 57). The father’s main role seemed to be one of reaction, fretting over money or blaming Augusta for buying the house. He takes a passive role, never seeming to be in a position of responsibility or control in the family. He plays a trump card in this final reaction, though. On the last page, Cohen tells us “[w]hen Mother came home, Daddy packed a suitcase and went away. We thought he was getting even with her, but he never came home again.”
Both of the parents were busy pulling themselves out of a mire. The aspect of the book that I found interesting was seeing where they succeeded and failed. The author was more in a position to see and feel the failures.
As I sat reading In My Mother's House at my son’s Tae Kwon Do class, a friend walked up to me and said, “The author is my mother-in-law's first cousin...Paula, she appears in the beginning of the book." My friend has met Cohen and vouches for the high-quality of her mothering and grandmothering.
The “about the author” section at the back of the book tells us that at the age of 63, Cohen became a Bat Mitzvah. The memoir hardly deals with being Jewish. I don’t mind the lack of religious upbringing; that’s how some families are. I am curious about the spiritual journey and any healing that may have occurred later in life, and thoughts on how her childhood made her who she is today.
Again in “about the author,” we learn that Cohen’s husband gave her a Bat Mitzvah present of a word processor “as a twist on the traditional fountain pen,” (page 126). In one incident in the memoir, Cohen sets her schoolbooks on her mother’s brand new loveseat after school (page 53). A fountain pen in her pencil bag leaked onto the loveseat. It seems to me that when Cohen wrote her memoir, her pen leaked all over her mother.
Jennifer Lader is a writer based in Bethlehem, PA. She specializes in writing for children. Jennifer lives with her husband, an architect, and their children. She is a member of the Great Lehigh Valley Writer's Group.
In My Mother’s House by Stephanie Kaplan Cohen gives an authentic child’s-eye view of a new way of life in America—the suburb. In her description of the idyllic days in Long Beach, Long Island, New York, Stephanie shares the experiences of a small town of the 1930s (population 5,817), when it was America's Healthiest City. Originally designed as a playground for the rich, Long Beach had gone bust and re-emerged as a bedroom community for families from New York City’s neighborhoods. Today, the population has increased sevenfold and the cozy community Stephanie’s stories evoke is a distant memory. Long Island, the biggest island in North America, lies just east of Manhattan. Because of its proximity to the big city, it led the way in American suburbanization. Even before the Civil War, Brooklyn Heights residents commuted to work in Manhattan. (Brooklyn is located at the western end of Long Island.) Twentieth century suburban development began with idealized upper-middle-class communities like Long Beach’s neighbor, Garden City. In 1906, William Reynolds, a 39-year-old former state senator and developer of four Brooklyn neighborhoods (Bedford-Stuyvesant, Borough Park, Bensonhurst and Brownsville) gathered investors in Long Beach. He acquired oceanfront property from private owners and Long Beach’s back streets from the Town of Hempstead so he could build a boardwalk, homes and hotels. To ensure that Long Beach lived up to Reynolds' billing as 'The Riviera of the East', Reynolds required every building to be constructed in a Mediterranean style with white stucco walls and red tile roofs. He stipulated they could be occupied only by white Protestants, though after he went bankrupt in 1918, these restrictions were lifted. The new town attracted wealthy businessmen and entertainers—Jewish, Italian, Irish and African-American. To Stephanie’s mother, reared on the Lower East Side and raising her own child in Queens, Long Beach looked like Nirvana. Although Long Beach, with its remarkable location on the ocean and its excellent schools, was a model of diversity between the wars, New York’s suburbs remained the province of the rich until after World War II. When Augusta Kaplan moved her young family to Long Beach, one of her next door neighbors was Irish, the other was Italian. In 1930, there were only 17,000 Jews on Long Island. Today there are more than 300,000. Stephanie describes riding the LIRR as she goes into the city—to Schrafts!—with her sister, and her father’s crazy driving that took her to Coney Island. Although the Kaplans were no longer in the city, they remained loyal to it all their lives. In Stephanie’s stories we see the car and other mod cons (as moder
n conveniences were then called) changing daily life: stoves, refrigerators, hot water, lighting, flush toilets and heating for homes. Radio, telephones and movies all opened new worlds to suburbanites and city dwellers alike. Her themes reflect the timeless concerns of childhood while her eagle eye captures a world in which the appliances we take for granted were a source of pride and wonder. 
