I'm Down

by Mishna Wolff

A memoir of the author's childhood up to about the age of 14. She is the white daughter of European-white parents, but her father apparently wanted to be close to black culture, so lived in a black neighborhood, had black friends, played dominoes, listened to soul music, and had black girlfriends. At school, Wolff is mocked for being white and clueless, but later on she scores highly on some aptitude tests and is moved to a private school with rich, white students, who find her mannerisms a little strange, Through it all, Wolff must deal with her father, who comes across in the memoir as a loving but hard-ass loser who can’t finish projects or hold down a job. When he marries a girl only ten years older than Mishna, the stepmother demands Mishna get a job at the age of 14, despite her maintaining a 4.0 at school and being involved in several extracurriculars.

I picked up this book because I thought it might have something interesting to say about race in America, how Wolff was too white for the black kids and too black for the white kids, but it only very briefly touches on race. Why was her father so interested in a culture that wasn’t his own? What kinds of cultural barriers were erected by her living in the neighborhood? These questions aren't answered or even addressed. Is race a huge factor in her social standing? Not really, she makes friends in both schools with no more trouble than most quiet, introspective kids. It is a funny memoir in parts, but in other parts I had to put it down briefly, the demands her father and stepmother putting on her so hostile as to edge on to emotional abuse. This isn't a book about race or culture; it's the memoir of a girl living in a poor neighborhood, who went to a rich school. It's told in an episodic manner, with the stories not building on each other or leading to any real insights. It certainly must also be at least a little fictionalized, as her lengthy conversations at the ages of 10-14 can’t be all that accurately recorded years later. 

Diary of a Young Girl

by Anne Frank

translated by B.M. Mooyaart-Doubleday

The universally known story of how Anne, thirteen to fourteen at the time of writing, was hidden from the Nazis in the secret upstairs room of an office, along with her sister, parents, another family (the Van Daans) and a dentist. She describes her fights with her mother, moons over boys, dwells on her reading and studies, and describes the political situation. When the Nazis begin carting Jews off to camps, the diary turns more thoughtful as she describes the stress and discomfort of eight people hiding quietly in cramped quarters. They deal with burglars, the police (equally frightening), rotten food, shared chamber pots, and frayed nerves. She and the Van Daans’ boy, Peter, start to have romantic feelings for one another, and at this point the diary becomes half tween girl typically pining for and pinning her eternal happiness on this one boy, and half startlingly mature ruminations on war, human nature, her own talents, and her desire to put her “high ideals” into practice and better the world. And there, the diary ends, three days before they were betrayed, and a month later they would be among the last Jews sent to the death camps, less than two months before the Allies liberated Holland.

What can one say about this book? I should have read it earlier. Everyone should read it. It’s the achingly sad, human face of the Holocaust. Anne presciently wrote that she wished “to go on living even after my death,” and she did, perhaps even in a way she would have accepted if given the choice, knowing her writing would shine a light on evil for the next hundred years or more. 

five stars 

Chronicles, Volume One

by Bob Dylan

A memoir of Dylan's early days, from the hungry Greenwich village years to the recording of Oh Mercy with Daniel Lanois in New Orleans and back again to the ‘60s and meeting John Hammond and signing to Columbia. It's an illuminating, rambling, interesting, contradictory, and frustrating book. While he uncovers a vast treasure trove of his varied influences, from Johnny Rivers to Dave von Ronk to Brecht’s "Pirate Jenny" to Genet's "The Balcony," he pays no mind to chronology; he deliberately leaves many dots unconnected. More maddening is his prose itself — sometimes poetic and crystal, sometimes rambling to the point of dementia, as if he's narrated the book into a tape recorder.

He makes grammatical mistakes, misusing "whom" and "myself," which is disheartening for a fan like me. But more often, the book taunts and teases with passages that seem inane: "Moe Asch was chatting with Mike. They were just standing around like people who knew what they were talking about." Is that expressive? Or worse: "I used to play the phenomenal 'Ebb Tide' by Frank Sinatra a lot and it had never failed to fill me with awe. The lyrics were so mystifying and stupendous. I could hear everything in his voice — death, God and the universe, everything. I had other things to do, though, and I couldn’t be listening to that stuff much." Wait, what? And Dylan has endless passages of what appears to be meaningless psychobabble: "With a new incantation code to infuse my vocals with manifest presence I could ride high… Thematic triplets making everything hypnotic." He goes on and on about changing, about a new vocal line and new way of performing, but then a few pages later remarks, "Here’s the thing — I wasn’t looking to express myself in any kind of new way." And yet, it is a fascinating book as well; Dylan's at his best talking about people and their psychologies, as when he discussing folk snobbery, or gushing over one of the musical greats like Robert Johnson. I doubt there'll ever be a volume two, but for all my carps about this one, I'd read the next if it ever came out.  

four stars