Writing

Reading

This is a great book. It tells Mary Gordon's search for who her father really was. She takes us from her idealized father, through her disillusionment , to her realization that she still loved him and how he had helped make her who she was.

The underlying story was about how people remake themselves. Her father remade himself from a despised Jewish immigrant, to a respectable, right wing catholic. Gordon's question was always, "Why?". Why did he reject everything that he was to become an anti-semitic, right wing zealot? She never gets an answer, just an occasional understanding.

What this book made me think about was how so many of us do remake ourselves. Most people don't usually totally reject everything they were but we all, to some extent, become something different than what we were. This happens at many times during our lives. We go to college and find that not everyone thinks like we do. We go to work at a different company and find ourselves changing to become accepted.

This isn't necessarily a bad type of change. Often this is a chance to grow, to think for ourselves, to open ourselves up to new ways of doing things, to gain perspective on life. It does take courage and thought to choose change and not just fit in, not just go with the crowd.

The change that Mary Gordon writes about is a more drastic type of change. This happens when someone rejects everything that they were to totally remake themselves in a new image. This can be done out of hate or fear or even despair. How many of the "missing persons" just walked away to start a new life?

Many of our ancestors remade themselves to a great extent when they immigrated to the United States, or other countries. Many people had to remake themselves when everything they knew was taken away from them. The children of recent immigrants make up a geneology that goes back to the Mayflower, light skinned African Americans pass as white, and people with just a trace of Native American blood are always descended from a Cherokee princess. People who see no future in who they are become someone else.

The question is not whether it is right to change, change is inevitable, but why we are changing and to what. When is it right to totally reject what we were and pretend that we are something else? I think that everyone changes, and should, but can we deny where we came from or who we were?