Memoir relates childhood trauma, eventual recovery

Salt on a Robin’s Tail by Andrea Kott; Blydyn Square Books; (c) 2020; ISBN 9781732-015678; 355 pages.

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO — This memoir is approximately 320 pages of despair, and 30 pages of hope and forgiveness.  If you are depressed, or feel nobody can understand the troubles you have,  you might take solace in this book, knowing that someone else has suffered through deep psychological pain and has emerged on the other side.  Reading it made me wonder if listening, as I was doing in the form of reading, without making any comment, was what it must be like to be a psychologist or a psychiatrist.  I listened and listened as author Kott vented and eventually came to some decisions about herself.  Sometimes, I think, the greatest gift we can give someone is to be a quiet audience.

Of course, ours was not a face-to-face transaction. Kott could not look into my eyes, study my body language, and be assured that I understood — really understood — how she was feeling.  Nevertheless, writing this book may well have been cathartic for her.  It was published.  Its message spread from editors to proofreaders to reviewers to independent readers.  So clearly, it is now in the process of  making an impact.

Kott’s story is that of a child who was born during her grieving mother’s all-too-hasty second marriage to a man who was abusive, perhaps because he hated himself.  Before long, Kott’s father left the scene, never paying child support, leaving her mother with too many bills to pay, too little self-confidence, and a growing reliance on alcohol to shore herself up, even as she increasingly let her daughter down.  Her mother’s  two older children, born during her first,  happy marriage, were unable to deal with their widowed mother’s growing depression and dependency. In escaping it, they left Kott, still a young child, to try to deal with it herself.  Kott’s pleas to her mother to please stop drinking only deepened the rift between the two of them, leading to emotional and occasional physical abuse.

Quite often Kott needed to just get out of their apartment, away from her mother, so as not to watch her sink deeper and deeper into drunkenness and despair.  When she was a little girl, her mother told her that if she could catch a robin and pour salt on its tail, the robin would remain still for her.  Often the child would spend hours in the neighborhood waiting for robins to come close enough.  She was no more successful in this than she was in trying to pull her mother out of her despondency.

One of the consequences of the family’s poverty was that her mother could not afford for her  to attend synagogue or Hebrew school.  She did not learn Hebrew or prayers, did not study for a bat mitzvah, and came to believe that she did not deserve to be Jewish.  When her public school friends would talk about  Chanukah, the High Holy Days, Passover, Shavuot, Succot, or Shabbat, she could not connect with them.  Ashamed to bring them to her home, where they might see her drunken mother, she felt left out, a social outcast — even though she often was invited to their homes.  Christmas, available everywhere, in stores, over the radio, on television, was accessible to her.  She believed that having a Christmas tree would give her a sense of belonging, and provide a reason for her friends–even a false one–about why she knew nothing about the Jewish religion.

Through public school, despite all her problems at home, Kott was an excellent straight-A student.  When the family moved from New York State to California — in fact to La Mesa, here in San Diego County — she became a champion debater.  The combination of good grades and debate skills won her a scholarship to Brandeis University, which is run under Jewish auspices.  Intimidated, she once again felt like she didn’t belong.

She transferred to UC Berkeley, and there too, where she worked as a janitor in a work-study program,  she felt overwhelmed, rejected, dejected, and for fleeting moments, even suicidal.  She decided to withdraw from school for a year, to get her health back, to pursue relationships, to try to find what had been missing for most of her life — the sense that somebody cared for her, really cared, especially a man.  She had several sexual relationships with men, but none at that point in her life could satisfy her psychological needs.

From California she returned to the East Coast, where she pursued a career as a journalist — one in which her clear writing style probably served her very well.  However, the joy she took in journalism didn’t last.

It was very late in this tale that Kott found the right man, married, had two children, and turned to the Judaism that she had preemptively rejected as a child.  She embraced Judaism’s daily traditions of tzedakah and tikkun olam, and its High Holy Day insistence on teshuvah, calling on her to reflect on the past year, to analyze how she might have hurt other people in her self-preoccupation, and to make amends.

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Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com