Objects of Love and Regret: A Brooklyn Story
by Richard Rabinowitz
Harvard University Press, £23.95
Richard Rabinowitz’s parents were unremarkable. Impoverished during the Depression, they climbed the social ladder, but only to become lower middle class. They never became titans of industry or American success stories.
Like so many, his mother Sarah arrived in the United States fleeing antisemitism in Poland; his father Dave grew up running wild in pre-war New York and received little formal education. That their son went on to become one of America’s preeminent historians and curators is perhaps the most surprising thing about them. So why tell their story?
In fact, Rabinowitz’s memoir, Objects of Love and Regret, celebrates the ordinariness of his upbringing, tracing his parents’ lives through the tough 1930s into the postwar boom years by examining the objects and possessions that gave their lives meaning.
So there is a bottle opener, bought by Sarah as a young woman for her indomitable mother Shenka.
Photo 5 Dave and Sarah boating (Read-Only)
Dave and Sarah as an engaged couple
There is the Evening in Paris perfume Dave courted Sarah with, the cheap but reliable folding chairs on which neighbours would gather on the steps of their houses in 1950s Brooklyn. The hot plate that represented business failure; the clock that saw his parents through their retirement.
It’s a neat device, and Rabinowitz, a leading figure behind the creation of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, paints an exhaustive portrait of the things that made up his parents’ lives; the food (so much food, always homemade), the cigar boxes for storage that were eventually usurped by Tupperwares, the smart suits his father wore while in the jewellery business, and finally the identikit furnishings in their Florida retirement community.
As much as anything, this is a love letter to consumerism; barely a page goes by without a nostalgic look at a famous American brand (Heinz, Crisco shortening) and how such innovations and household gadgets transformed the daily lives of the country’s housewives.
As he writes, this focus on the domestic represented a triumph over his parents’ early lives. “Capital H” History, the major events of their time, could only visit the household through the Magnavox television, and not through the front door, as the pogroms, the Depression, and World War II had.
While their story is unexceptional, it is — as told by their son via his memories and those of his older sister — compelling. I’ve read and enjoyed so many immigrant stories, but the focus on what came next is rarer.
The later chapters, showing the demographic and social changes in East Brooklyn that prompted his parents to move away, are poignant and you feel his mother’s loss when, for example, friends are scattered and her traditional shopping route is upset.
Equally, the section exploring his grandmother’s time back in Poland while her husband attempted to make money in America, is very interesting; I loved learning that “the half-dozen “Americanskas,” the women waiting to join husbands” held potluck seders rather than dine alone.
That said, Objects of Love and Regret is overly long and repetitive. I lost count of the number of times the author explored the fact that his mother experienced Judaism primarily through food and lifestyle, or wrote of his father’s unhealthy desire to be sole breadwinner.
And while Rabinowitz goes into great detail looking at his parents’ psyches and his sister’s failed marriage, he is less introspective, telling us almost nothing about his own adult life. Equally, there are passages where he imagines his mother’s thoughts at a particular moment that veer into fantasy; a book like this is better when it deals in facts rather than speculation.
Still, it’s a fascinating read; distinct from books about extraordinary immigrant dynasties like Hadley Freeman’s House of Glass. But that’s what makes it captivating. It could be my family, or yours, one of thousands and thousands of similar stories that make up the tapestry of diaspora history.
