What a difficult book. I feel like there is knowledge and insight to be gained in these pages --somewhere-- but it's simply not given up easily enough. I mean, I like obscure memoirs, but this one isn't worth the effort to finish.

The book recalls memories associated with cousin Katie. But in the parts that I read we get more of the conflict that can exist when you are a Southern Jew in the North. In an extended family of blonds and brunettes, light and swarthy complexions, there's the opportunity for lots of conflict. Southern-ness versus Northern-ness versus different flavors of Jewish-ness.

This should have been more interesting read than it was.

And part of the problem was the language.

My image of our house was that it reverberated
with sounds that had to be classified, and that this
was society.

There is meaning here, just not enough to make it worth transliterating this verbiage into something worth thinking about.

But Physics was more like our own household,
full of closets that scarcely knew any longer what
they held, in whose depths I could spend an after-
noon with the concrete.

What it could have been is pages filled with the tantalizing hints of life, but Hortense passes by these too quickly. Like the cousins who were trying to pass themselves off as Christian. Or the puzzle she found in the big leatherbound family Bible.

... a receipt, issued to my grandfather for insurance
on a slave, that made me queasy, since according to my
father our grandmother had never kept any servants
except the freed. Perhaps my grandfather, of whom I
knew only the severe space between nose and mouth in
his mutton-chopped portrait, had been of another mind.

And there are just these quick snippets before we jolt ahead to another unrelated paragraph.
.
I so wanted to be fair in evaluating and considering this short memoir, however things like "another cheeseparing burden of the verbal" kept me from finishing. Sigh. ( )