Even You by Marilyn Oser; Mill City Press, Minneapolis; © 2015; ISBN-13: 978-1-63413-546-7; 261 pages, $15.95
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO—This is an intense book. At times it educated me. At other times it made me shudder in revulsion. On fleeting occasions, the author’s fascination with the little ironies of words made me laugh. The one thing Even You never did was bore me. A fictional dead woman shall long live on in my imagination.
We start with the fact that Claire Bramany is grieving for her lesbian lover, Jessie Friedman, who had been fighting cancer when her life was snuffed out in an automobile accident. Cleaning and ordering Jessie’s belongings, Claire finds notebooks from Jessie’s childhood in which she related incidents that in all their time together, Jessie had never mentioned to Claire.
Claire had felt their passionate love was 100 percent honest, in which they kept absolutely no secrets from each other. Initially she was angered by the notebooks and the secrets they contained. She felt betrayed by her dead lover.
But as she read the notebook entries, she became increasingly horrified by what had happened to Jessie as a little girl, while she was being raised in Oklahoma by her diabetic mother’s family during World War II. Her mother’s family insisted that she take on a different last name lest neighbors and friends know that her father was a Jew.
More than by the anti-Semitism, Claire was repulsed – as readers will be – by Jessie’s account of how her mother’s brother molested her under the rest of the family’s noses, with Jessie, all of nine years old, feeling powerless to tell anyone anything about what Uncle Jimmy forced her to do.
Claire transforms her anger into a quest for revenge. She intends to find “Uncle Jimmy” and to confront him. Her search for her lover’s tormentor, her own stages of grief, and the stories in Jenny’s notebook alternate in the book, which ends with a surprise.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. You may comment to him at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com