What We're Reading - English Department - College of Arts and Science

A Family of Strangers
by Deborah Tall

Review by Wm. Anthony Connolly
Wm. Anthony Connolly is a Phd
in English candidate with a
creative nonfiction concentration.
He is at work on a spiritual
memoir.

Anatomy of a Search
posted on 09-15-08

In this moving memoir the late Deborah Tall displays her gifts for fragmentary prose, sheer doggedness and a poet’s receptivity. A Family of Strangers (Sarabande Press) is the story of Tall’s lifelong genealogical search for family roots obfuscated by her father’s reticence and reluctance—characteristics so prevalent within the post World War Jewish diaspora through which Tall must rummage around for answers. The memoir is a story chronicling familial frustration, but also a lamentation about the byzantine realities of immigration. Tall’s decision to render her memoir in fragmentary and prosaic chapters perfectly fits its content. Investigation by negligible documentation—via the sketchy memory of aging relatives and the banal officialdom of migrant movement—is directly related to the reader as one progresses through the work. In toto, the author’s accumulated farrago of half-truths, derisory photographs and frustrating leads mimics the piecemeal way Tall must have had to gather her narrative thread and the very lacunae that resisted her search for clarity. Glory eventually comes, in some small measure, so all was not lost: Tall does come to visit and know some of her East European family.

Unlike a lot of fragmentary book-length prose, A Family of Strangers is not so much a mosaic (although it includes some mosaic elements pertaining to fifties domesticity, nuclear bomb fears and suburbanism) as it is a chronological charting of Tall’s campaign from an early age to the few years remaining before her unfortunate death. Many frustrations along the way would have stymied the most ardent searcher, but Tall persisted. As the reader progresses through the book the mosaic pattern is sacrificed for a larger, braided exploration of memory and genealogy in relation to Tall’s own story. Part I “Secrets: Kept and Unkept” begins in the 1950s, and the book terminates in Part V “Geographical Genealogy,” in contemporary times, possibly early in this new century. Each part of the memoir contains one-sentence chapters (often quoting secondary sources) and chapters that are no longer than half a page; indeed, rarely is the story propelled forward in chapters longer than two pages. It makes for quick, but somewhat choppy reading. Motifs such as “secrets,” “anatomy,” “genealogy,” “memory,” and “family,” earlier on, repeat as chapter concerns and titles in a poetic refrain, while the last half to two-thirds of the memoir reads with a swifter, more personal sense of urgency. Still, Tall does not abandon lyricism altogether—“Questions throbbed in the air like concussive blows” or “Clouds go fist to fist in the lowering sky. Mile after mile, hour after hour, I grow hypnotized by hopelessness,” are a few of the countless examples of her poet’s eye.

About halfway through the memoir, at a particular turning point in the narrative, the author wisely slows down her narrative to bring the reader up to speed. “I assemble all the documents I’ve managed to obtain in a circle on the floor, myself its center,” Tall writes. But in the end, those documents would not yield full disclosure: “My people’s wiliness for survival continually thwarts the reliable reconstruction of their history.”

This reconstruction then is gap-filled, but fulfilling not only for Tall and her American family, but also for readers who have ever wondered from where they came.