Title: Family Fictions Author: Richard Hall Published by: Viking, 1991 ISBN: 0-670-83784-9 [hardcover, 273 pages]
Families disappear in America all the time -- by dissolution, marriage, sterility, death -- but what happens when a family disappears and then reappears with a new identity, determined to escape the social and religious prejudices of its past? Is there a price to be paid, and will the truth always have its revenge? What are the hidden costs of invented lives, altered heritages? Does trying to erase the past and rewrite the present destroy the future?In Family Fictions, a passionate, richly textured tale, we follow the Schanberg family, a tight-knit Jewish clan, as one branch -- parents Judd and Margaret, children Harris and Mag -- splits off and heads for another life under a different name in the suburbs of New York City. The new Shay family has shed everything that would tie it to its old identity: synagogue, birth and school records, friends, business associates. Spanning thirty years, from the 1930s to the 1960s -- from the Depression to the Kennedy era -- moving from Manhattan to Westchester County to Harvard to a farm in upstate New York, Family Fictions follows the up-and-down fortunes of the members of this embattled family as they deal with the various crises of adultery, bankruptcy, death, love, coming of age, and marriage. Strong-willed yet sympathetic Margaret's rationalization for the invention of a new family (to "make it easier for the children") is examined, and the thoughts and feelings of the other members of the family are probed as the author subtly switches viewpoints in a narrative tour de force.
The issue comes to a head in a family confrontation many years later, when Harris, the grown son, refuses to lie either about his Jewish background or his gay sexuality. Yet it is Margaret, now a matriarch, who claims victory in a profound and ironic finale, which permits us to understand how social pressure, the need to thrive, and the promise of America itself combine to create the identities necessary for survival -- not just for one family but for all of us.
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