The Brooklyn Rail

Within the genre of memoir, Carol Becker has crafted an absorbing psychological thriller. This is not a melodramatic statement: the author juggles meticulously detailed tender anecdotes, psychoanalysis, and a healthy dose of clairvoyance to chart the unraveling of what can be one of the strongest bonds: that between an only child, a girl, who grows into a woman, and her father. Becker builds her argument piece-by-piece—a literal house of cards—creating a deceptively robust structure of superficially functioning relationships, but revealing to the reader with gentle hints that when we wear our hearts on our sleeves, we often miss the red flags of much deeper dysfunction until it is far too late. Tragically, there may have been no chance at all to fix the situation in the first place. This resolution is not as nihilistic as it sounds, for Becker provides what is a necessity of memoir, radical vulnerability, which is the best one can do, as she exposes her rage and her broken heart while choosing not to punish the sinner.

The events of Becker’s early life take place against the rich, detail-fertile backdrop of Crown Heights, Brooklyn in the 1950s. Here is something of a wonderland of racial and ethnic diversity, which was perhaps as fragile a perception as that of the mythos of the author’s own family, but the stories, which Becker loves telling, give insight into the author’s grown voice. There’s the marvelous tale of Becker’s cousin and neighbor Mark, whose father brought home a snapping turtle he found on Long Island. The amphibian took up residence in the family’s sole bathtub, forcing its members to wash elsewhere for a few weeks until the experiment in exotic pets ended and the turtle was returned to its habitat. Or the much more sobering image of the multitude of Yahrzeit candles which flickered in neighbor’s homes on Friday night, commemorating entire extended families and revealing the devastating impact of the Holocaust on the many Jewish immigrants in that section of Brooklyn. This is a beautiful tapestry, a backdrop, and Becker makes sure we see the romance of her rakish Jewish father, a hustler and gambler, and her glamorous mother, a polish Catholic transplant from Pennsylvania mining country, courting for ten years, and finally courageously marrying in the face of discrimination from both families—a bitter irony when Becker’s father turns on her for dating a black musician and composer in Chicago the late seventies.

What is unconditional love between spouses or a child and parent? In the end, it is a flimsy thing. All of Becker’s sweet anecdotes don’t add up in the end to her immense disappointment in her “tyrannically racist father.” Like her, we are seduced by the catalogue of daddy-daughter activities: George would take Carol with him when he liquidated out-of-business shops throughout the tri-state area, then auctioned off the contents. This surely made for a street-smart and savvy New York kid, right? But we eventually wonder if a less-colorful, less problematic father would be preferable. He also taught her poker, imbuing her not only with a gambler’s bravado, but truly useful skills like reading other player’s “tells” and weighing the odds. The father and daughter have the closeness of co-conspirators, and even her mother Helen is jealous of the connection: it is all very convincing—she masterfully builds us up to let us down.

In Losing Helen, Becker tells a much more straightforward story of her mother’s death, but this shorter and less nostalgic memoir is a primer on navigating the impossibility of understanding the loss of the most important person in one’s life. In George’s Daughter, the author utilizes her medium, a stream of vignettes and anecdotes, to maximum advantage. They are not only her own stories: Becker pulls tales from literature, such as Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, William Blake’s Book of Urizen, the Greek myth of Ariadne, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and literal history to facilitate her own narrative; Mayor Richard J. Daley’s policies of divide-and-conquer among the different races and ethnicities in Chicago in order to maintain a politically advantageous position act as a loose metaphor for George’s actions. The stream of anecdotes slowly grows darker as Becker leaves the realm of innocent youth. A college roommate falls into drugs and dies, and George becomes more clearly misogynistic and racist. The stories clear a path to clarity about his real character, but the heartbreaking contradiction that he seemed like such a perfect match as father to a precocious only child is only more greatly heightened. In a very poignant way, we all go into the disastrous fallout of Becker’s interracial romance with our eyes wide open.

Throughout the book, dreams and visions play a key role in telling the story, and Becker is unabashed about her reliance on these oracular events as guideposts in her life. As in Shakespeare, both Helen and George appear in order to assist in healing and setting things right. Whether you choose to believe or not—and Becker categorically does—the visitations and omens assist in both tying a personal narrative to collective culture (i.e. myth and parable) and assisting the author in her slow path to healing and comprehension of the inherent contradictions of unconditional love. “Cautiously trying to lance this abscess again, the poison began to drain,” Becker tells us as she comes to a cold reconciliation with her father. For all the injury inflicted on her, Becker never chooses to willingly renounce her father—it is all on him. When his health begins to fail at a brisk pace, he desires reconciliation, and his daughter accommodates him. It is not a fairy tale, and he never apologizes or even seems to discuss what happened, but he needs his daughter and she is there for it. Like the impossibility of understanding death, there is also the sometimes impossibility of aligning a good parent with a questionable person; and there is no right answer, but somehow George’s Daughter provides a workable one.