a fictional memoir by Arthur Sharenow
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Inspired by the life of the author’s mother, Rebecca Remembers is a searing exploration of a woman trying to understand her own baffling life journey. It is the story of a charming and vibrant young woman, a toddler when she came to America with her poor immigrant family, fleeing from the pogroms of Czarist Russia.
As she entered young womanhood Rebecca pursued The American dream with energy and enthusiasm. She pulled herself out of poverty in the slums of Brooklyn, survived a psychologically abusive mother and seemed to be on the road to happiness with a successful husband and two children.
Yet, Rebecca’s American Dream was just a façade, as behind the curtain of her seemingly perfect suburban life, was a woman in torment. She started hearing hostile voices to which she responded with increasingly irrational behavior. Her life turned into a nightmare, as her family life unraveled completely when her husband left her.
She vividly recalls her experiences in the various psychiatric institutions with which she became very familiar through so many of her years. The reader gets a glimpse of what life was like in those institutions in the nineteen forties and fifties, where rudimentary shock treatments were the norm and where even experimental brain surgeries (Lobotomies) were performed.
Like James McBride’s The Color of Water and Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, Rebecca Remembers is a son’s loving tribute to his mother and his attempt to understand her suffering and ultimate redemption.