Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy

by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Overview

An intimate memoir from a founding editor of Ms. magazine who grew up in a Jewish immigrant family mired in secrets, haunted by their dread of shame and stigma, determined to hide their every imperfection—and in denial or despair when they couldn’t.

“A frank and often amusing tabulation of well-kept family secrets... a story of high-stakes melodrama and surreptitious relations, in which runaway brides, false marriages, lost children and other moral crises abound. But there is more here than mishegas.” —Jake Nevins, New York Times

“The richness of Pogrebin’s stories, the complexity and beauty of her storytelling, and her devastatingly honest soul-baring make Shanda a powerfully stunning piece of life and art.”
—Mayim Bialik, actor, author, neuroscientist, and co-host of Jeopardy

The word “shanda” is defined as shame or disgrace in Yiddish. This book, Shanda, tells the story of three generations of complicated, intense 20th-century Jews for whom the desire to fit in and the fear of public humiliation either drove their aspirations or crushed their spirit.

In her deeply engaging, astonishingly candid memoir, author and activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin exposes the fiercely-guarded lies and intricate cover-ups woven by dozens of members of her extended family. Beginning with her own long-suppressed secret, the story spirals through the hidden lives of her parents and relatives—revealing the truth about their origins, personal traumas, marital misery, abandoned children, religious transgressions, sexual identity, radical politics, and supposedly embarrassing illnesses. While unmasking their charades and disguises, Pogrebin also showcases her family’s remarkable talent for reinvention in a narrative that is, by turns, touching, searing, and surprisingly universal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781637583968
Publisher:	Post Hill Press
Publication date:	09/13/2022
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	414,301
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Letty Cottin Pogrebin, co-founder of Ms. magazine, is a nationally acclaimed writer, activist, and public speaker. The author of twelve books, she has also published articles and essays in numerous print and online periodicals, including the New York Times, The Nation, and Huffington Post. She is a co-founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Ms. Foundation for Women; a past president of the Authors Guild and Americans for Peace Now; and has served on the boards of the Harvard Divinity School Women in Religion Program and the Brandeis University Women’s and Gender Studies Program. Among her many honors is a Yale University Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, a Matrix Award for excellence in communication and the arts, and an Emmy Award for her work as consulting editor on the TV version of Marlo Thomas’s Free to Be...You and Me. Pogrebin lives with her husband in New York City and Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

lettycottinpogrebin.com

Facebook.com/letty.pogrebin

Table of Contents

Preface: A Good Name 19

I Family Secrets

Chapter 1 Brain Storm 31

Chapter 2 Bright Things Kept in the Dark Tend to Tarnish 46

Chapter 3 Hiding Is My Heritage 57

Chapter 4 The Plastic Shopping Bag 66

Chapter 5 The Palestine Letters, Spring 1939 70

Chapter 6 She Could Hide a Hippo in a Hatbox 80

Chapter 7 The Florida Letters, Winter 1940-41 87

Chapter 8 The Day I Learned My Parents Were Liars 93

Chapter 9 Papering Over Marital Misery 113

Chapter 10 "Just Put a Pillow Over Your Head and Turn Up the Radio" 119

Chapter 11 It Was Easier to Fib Than to Fail 131

Chapter 12 "All My Life I Led a Double Life" 137

Chapter 13 Our Kitchen Was Kosher, Our Stomachs. Cheated 142

Chapter 14 No One Would Tell Simma about Sadye 148

Chapter 15 The Less You Know 158

Chapter 16 The Knippel 165

Chapter 17 Don't Leave Me and Take Your Secrets with You 168

Chapter 18 Like All Children Reared among Radicals, We Hid Things That Could Get Us in Trouble 176

Chapter 19 The Antithesis of a Secret 180

II Private Shame

Chapter 20 They'll Say I'm Not Ready for Kindergarten 189

Chapter 21 She Lied to Enhance Her Past and Preserve Her Dignity 193

Chapter 22 Name Changers, Game Changers 200

Chapter 23 My Missing Uncles 211

Chapter 24 I Didn't Own a Cashmere Sweater 214

Chapter 25 Rather Than Live in Disgrace, I Decided to Kill Myself 224

Chapter 26 Family Envy 237

Chapter 27 "Of Course Not, He's Just Artistic" 241

Chapter 28 "Concealment Makes the Soul a Swamp; Confession Is How You Drain It" 246

Chapter 29 I Never Reported the Men Who Molested Me 253

Chapter 30 Were You Ever Ashamed of Your Mom? 260

III Guilty Secrets

Chapter 31 Two-Timing Judah Maccabee 271

Chapter 32 The Menorah 273

Chapter 33 Thank God Nothing Like That Is Happening in My Family 278

Chapter 34 Pity Is Better 288

Chapter 35 At Last, Rena 293

Chapter 36 Girlhood Pain, Grown-up Guilt 308

Chapter 37 Just Skip Supper 312

Chapter 38 Jews Go to College. End of Story. 323

Chapter 39 Motherguilt 328

Chapter 40 I Couldn't Give Her My Blessing 336

IV Public Shame

Chapter 41 Twenty Million People Knew Our Secret 343

Chapter 42 Period. End of Sentence. 349

Chapter 43 Loss, Shame, and What I Wore 354

Chapter 44 We Lived in the Tension between Pride and Paranoia 360

Chapter 45 Portnoy and Me 372

Chapter 46 My Cousin, Israel 376

Chapter 47 Busha v'Charpa 384

Chapter 48 Some Secrets Save Lives 389

Chapter 49 The Mouse That Roared 396

Chapter 50 Of All Her Wishes, Only This One Came True 400

Chapter 51 "You Think That's Bad?!!" 403

Chapter 52 A Secret-Free Life 411

Acknowledgments 415

About the Author 417

Discussion Questions 419

Glossary 423

Editorial Reviews

"Pogrebin divulges her own family's astonishing array of secrets and delves into the annals and anthropology of Judaism and feminism, of fat shaming and sexual shaming, and more. Shanda is a book for anyone who has ever felt or feared shame, which is to say, this is a book for everyone."

Ellen Goodman

"With wit, erudition, and searing honesty, Shanda unfolds like a riveting mystery novel—you can't stop reading until the very end. A powerful subject, treated with sensitivity and grace."

Francine Klagsbrun

"This is a memoir wonderfully grounded in the vibrancy of Jewish-American life, circa mid-20th-century. Its warmth and affection are contagious."

Vivian Gornick

"In her revealing memoir, Pogrebin, widely known for her intelligence, style, generosity, and boldness, admits the heavy burden of secrets, including her own which she has long carried. Shanda, her clear-eyed look at one immigrant family's habit of secrecy and fear of shame reveals why a lifetime of trying to uncover hidden truths has informed her insightful books and articles on topics many fear to tackle."

Ruth J. Abram

"You don't have to be Jewish to love Shanda. (I grew up a Congregationalist Christian). You will marvel at Pogrebin's always compassionate, often funny descriptions of the astounding family secrets kept by those nearest and dearest to her. (My language would not have been quite so wonderful!)."

Former Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder (Colorado)

"Pogrebin has written much about family, politics, revolution, and evolution. Now she brings her fulsome attention to private and public shame, the personal secrets that are ever-haunting, and the national shame that causes brutal conflicts and global disasters. Shanda is a memoir about secrets that can paralyze us or, when released, help us fly."

Judy Collins

"With unflinching honesty, Pogrebin takes on the defining role of shame in her family, helps us name our own vulnerabilities, and reframes humiliation and secrecy into a powerful reckoning with our hidden truths and by extension, our humanity. Shanda is amazing, relatable, her bravest book yet."

Angela Buchdahl

"Secrets are costly—heavy weights to carry around. In Shanda, Letty Cottin Pogrebin takes aim at shame, the factory where the costliest secrets are made. She dismantles the machinery of shame, and she does it with stories that are vivid, emotional, and unforgettable."

Alan Alda

"Pride may be a deadly sin, but shame is simply deadly. With her trenchant wit and generous heart, Letty Cottin Pogrebin explores the theological and historical imperatives that drove her family to conceal pain and bury truths in service to misguided ideas of propriety and perfectionism. Shanda is a bracing book: both liberating and exhilarating."

Geraldine Brooks

"From its opening lines, Shanda captures our universal feelings about secrets and shame, and never lets us go. In this emotionally deep, often profoundly funny memoir, Letty Cottin Pogrebin confronts the darkness, shrinks it, and brings us out into the light. Her literary voice is one-in-a-million."

Tovah Feldshuh

"Pogrebin tells personal stories that, despite their particularity, speak to everyone's experience, and the wisdom she draws from Jewish teachings speaks to readers of any faith tradition or cultural heritage. Like all great memoirs, Shanda is an intimate reflection of the human in all of us."

David Kraemer

★ 2022-07-13
Of family secrets, roads not taken, private failings, and other incidents that induce shanda, the Yiddish word for shame.

Pogrebin, a prolific author and co-founder of Ms. magazine, begins this lively memoir with her four grandparents, who “produced a combined fourteen offspring, who, in turn, birthed twenty-five children, including me, a cast of characters with enough secrets to fill this book twice over.” Once is plenty, as the author’s family dammed up a flood of scandalous secrets that have kept her guessing for decades. The sense of shame that propels her stories is amplified by the idea that Jews are often expected to live “morally upright, socially useful, and professionally exemplary” lives, and its effects are far-reaching. When Bernie Madoff went to prison for fraud, destroying the financial lives of some 37,000 people, one son killed himself, another died of shanda-born lymphoma, another went to prison, and Madoff’s widow went into hiding and tried to kill herself. “I didn’t lose a penny with him, but I, too, felt his swindle to be a blight on the Jewish collective,” writes the author. Though not nearly as venal, Pogrebin’s family skeletons in the closet are real: She hid a brain tumor from old friend Alan Alda out of shame for being ill, for example, and a grandmother was a runaway bride, thus committing “the heinous sin of publicly shaming a man.” In addition, changes of name run throughout the generations to disguise Jewishness in a strange land, “which, I submit, proves that hiddenness, especially hiding one’s true identity, is associated with Jews in particular and explains why I think of shame and secrecy as quintessentially Jewish issues.” Pogrebin writes with sympathy and affection of these and other foibles, some more and some less serious, whether letting a son skip college to go to culinary school or confessing that she panicked when “one of my daughters almost married a Catholic.”

A wise, funny look behind the curtains of a family that, it would seem, has little to be ashamed of.

Kirkus Reviews