I Love Gootie: My Grandmother's Story - Softcover

Apple, Max

3.97

64 ratings by Goodreads

9780446675970: I Love Gootie: My Grandmother's Story

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446675970 ISBN 13: 9780446675970

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2000

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Written with the same emotional power as his critically acclaimed "Roommates, " Apple takes a heartwarming and hilarious look at the life of his grandmother. While much of Gootie's advice was hilariously off-target, she taught Apple about the power of love and the art of storytelling.

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Review:

"It must have been the Yiddish," muses Max Apple in the introduction to I Love Gootie of the conversation at the Houston Yiddish speakers' club that became the seed of this book. "In her language it seemed easy and natural to talk about her. In English, when I told questioners that my grandma did nothing, it was true--in English. In Yiddish I began to scratch at the richness of that nothing."

In 1994, Max Apple published Roommates: My Grandfather's Story, about his adult years spent with his irascible grandfather Rocky, who was devotedly American in the way that only a naturalized American can be. Gootie, Rocky's sturdy counterpart, always spoke Yiddish and belonged in spirit to Serei, the Lithuanian shtetl which she left behind physically in 1923 when she moved to Grand Rapids. Her extended family life was warm and rich and occasionally problematic. Gootie and young Max--"Mottele" to Gootie, named for the son she had lost--had a relationship almost as remarkable as Max and Rocky's. He worried about holding her hernia together if her body truss should break; she insisted that his 16-year-old female study partner was pregnant and looking for a sucker to marry. When he rebelled against the strictures of Gootie's Michigan shtetl and started hanging out at the local diner, she put on her Persian lamb coat and accompanied him over his embarrassed protests, determined to observe for herself the suspicious attractions of overpriced coffee and teenage aimlessness. But when she had a stroke, Max sat at her bedside and translated Beowulf from Old English to Yiddish, just to keep her company. Her final bequest to him was two bottles of champagne for his wedding and the fine art of telling a grand story. The champagne evaporated, but the spring of stories flows freely. Though she might publicly lament that he never opened a store, Gootie would almost surely be proud.

From Kirkus Reviews:

This nostalgic sequel to novelist Apple's Roommates (1994), about his extraordinary grandfather, focuses on the authors less charismatic but equally original grandmother. Gootie was born in 1881 in a Lithuanian shtetl and grew up with all of the superstitions of that rural Old World culture (including spitting in all four directions to ward off the ``evil eye''). Apple makes plain, though, that she was far more than a stock figure drawn from Fiddler on the Roof. She was the calming influence on her hotheaded husband, Rocky, and although she seemed to defer to him, she in fact quietly controlled her turbulent householdand captivated her grandson. She adapted to life in small-town Michigan with aplomb, without sacrificing her identity. As an outsider, she offered some sharp criticisms of American society, keeping her grandson from too wholehearted an embrace of pop culture. She worried about him forgetting his traditions. And she fretted about his girlfriends, comparing one (an avid horseback rider) to a marauding Cossack. She was suspicious of people too ready to embrace modernity, especially in matters of courtship and matchmaking, observing that ``the cat and dog are modern too . . . they just go out into the street.'' Her own attempts at matchmaking were disastrous but add much to the book's fine humor. The last 50 pages are less engaging, as Apple finishes high school and leaves for college. As he reads to her in his final hospital visit, Gootie gets in some parting shots about college book learning and Western civilization in general. ``Shakespeare is not worth five cents,'' she concludes, and ``most of the classics are about whores.'' Gootie left her grandson a rich inheritance of Yiddish culture and folk wisdom, and a love of storytelling. Apple's biography is thus also about the source of his unique writer's mind; listening to Gootie, its easy to see the origin of his ability to spin a good story. Fresh, affectionate, and moving. -- Copyright �1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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