Jane Vonnegut Yarmolinsky (1922–1986)

In June of 1958, Jane Yarmolinsky suffered a prolonged period of insomnia, marked by a series of dreams about refugees coming to her house. In September of that year, in a startling sequence of events, Jane's household—which had heretofore included one husband, one wife, three children, one dog, one cat, and one bird—swelled with the impromptu addition of four more children, two more dogs, one more cat, one more bird, and a turtle. Were these the refugees she had dreamed about?

The four children, all boys, had been orphaned when their mother, Jane's sister-in-law, died of cancer thirty-six hours after their father perished in a freak train accident. Jane and husband Carl barely considered any option other than taking over the care of his sister's children. As Jane described it, "twelve days after the train wreck . . . three carloads of boys, dogs, prized personal possessions, and what memories were left began moving in the direction of Barnstable, where I was doing my best to make room for it all."

The first half of Jane's catalog of memories is a description of those twelve days and the following months during which the details of a new family structure were worked out. The second half of her narrative devotes a chapter to each child—concentrated individual attention that could never have been possible in the untidy atmosphere of a household that included seven children and a multitude of pets and school friends. Only in retrospect does she have the luxury of time to thoughtfully don the skin of each child, in turn. It is a remarkable exercise.

Jane assigned pseudonyms to each family member in an attempt to protect privacy. It seems a useless effort, since her husband, to whom she assigned the name Carl, was novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. At the time she was completing her memoir, Jane was racing against her anticipated death from cancer. She did not live to see it in print. If she had, it is doubtful that she would have approved her name appearing as Jane Vonnegut Yarmolinsky, a designation presumably designed to enhance the book's marketability, but certainly not in service to anonymity.

I am a fan of memoir, and I read with interest both the critically lauded and the humblest of efforts. It was my reading of Charles Shields's Kurt Vonnegut biography, And So It Goes, that motivated me to seek out more information on the man and his work, an exercise that resulted in my discovering Jane's memories of their domestic lives. Even allowing that Jane's memoir was specifically about the children, I was struck by the back-seat role the children played in Shields's version of Kurt's life. It reminded me of the writings of George Johnston and Charmian Clift, two Australian writers who married and had four children together.

Charmian's writing, particularly her nonfiction, is a story of the lives of children and the circle of adults, mostly female, who revolve around them. In George's work—the autobiographical novels that ensconced him in the literary hall of fame—the children are barely present. Charmian Clift had a long and successful career as a writer. Though not so elegant a writer as her husband, she was nonetheless a very good writer and a much better storyteller than her more celebrated husband.

Jane Yarmolinsky was a fine writer who simply put other things first. She writes:
"Had I been capable of generalizing amid all the confusion, I might have come to a conclusion that in fact it took me another twenty-seven years to formulate: the really important things happen in absolutely no time at all, like the conception of life, like death, like falling in love. So why do we worry so much about having no time? What started as a lament that I had so little ended in the surprising acknowledgment that I had all the time I needed for what really mattered" (p. 73) .

"So what is there to say when you know you don't have much time left?" Jane asks towards the end of this touching and beautifully written memoir. She has, in fact, some very wise and wonderful things to say, and it's well worth the time it takes to read her final words.… (meer)