Leak in the Heart: Tales from a Woman's Life - Softcover

Moskowitz, Faye

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0879236590 ISBN 13: 9780879236595

Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher, 1985

Synopsis

These are twenty-four autobiographical story-essays, witty, vulnerable, and wise, about growing up part of a puzzled and unassimilated Orthodox Jewish family in a Michigan small-town in the 1930s and '40s and about the wider world of marriage, children, teaching and writing after that rich beginning.

About this title

About the Author:

Moskowitz is a guest commentator for "All Things Considered" and a contributor to The Washington Post and to The New York Times "Hers" column. She is a director of and teacher at The Edmund Burke School.

From Publishers Weekly:

The litany to self-pity that these stories intone makes reader empathy redundant. Each protagonist neglects and thus alienates the significant other in her life, as if the woe that besets her were hers alone. In "A Leak in the Heart," we are offered a dead baby, an inconsolable mother and a presumably untouched father, denied the sexual congress that, one infers, for the wife never amounted to more than obedience to her marriage vows. "Irene" also seems only provisionally married, to a man whose paycheck she squanders and whose unsatisfactory child she bears, driven by her uneventful existence to shopping sprees and stealing. Almost equally despondent is "Thelma," a young girl victimized both by the penuriousness of her family and the outrageous size of her nose, conditions made interdependent by the refusal of her mother to pay for plastic surgery. Nicely fashioned prose and a sprinkling of brilliant images notwithstanding, the overall dolor of this collection muffles even the most graceful of authorial touches.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 0879236590
• ISBN 13: 9780879236595
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224