With ten published books of verse, several poetry anthologies, and numerous scholarly and critical works to his name—including the much-praised “Gabriel, A Poem,” a book-length elegy for his son who died tragically at the age of twenty-two, and the bestselling “How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry” and “A Poet’s Glossary”—Edward Hirsch is a major force both as a maker and popularizer of poetry. The publication of “My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-up Comedy, A Skokie Elegy” takes the Chicago-born Hirsch out of the comfort zone he has inhabited since the 1981 publication of “For the Sleepwalkers,” his first poetry collection, and into the realm of fact-based autobiography.
But not conventional autobiography. As the volume’s twin subtitles proclaim, Hirsch’s youthful reminiscences are simultaneously light and heavy–a stand-up routine not by a joke machine like Rodney Dangerfield, but rather in the deeper, biting style of a Lenny Bruce. The book is made up of brief, pointed, determinedly unfancy shards of memory, sandwiched between a taut headline and a punchy closer. The vignettes are tiny comical epiphanies that together add up to, if not a complete picture of one person’s childhood and adolescence, then certainly a funny, moving and highly readable account of a very particular time and milieu.
Some of the segments bear mock-serious titles such as “Aubade” (i.e., daybreak song), in this case a memory of the shouting and discord that signaled breakfast-time in the Hirsch household, or “The Italian Palazzo,” describing his mother’s desultory attempts at decorating their 1950s-era cookie-cutter Skokie home. There are darker headings, too, such as “Bad Signs,” a reference to the prewar apartment buildings in Logan Square where the front door bore the warning, “No dogs or Jews allowed.”
This isn’t just a portrait of the artist as a young man—it’s also a portrait of Skokie, the town that mushroomed in the 1950s and sixties, attracting thousands of city-bred Jews who weren’t always made to feel welcome elsewhere in the north suburbs. Hirsch’s family moved to Skokie from the city when he was about ten years old, and he lived there until he headed off to Grinnell College in Iowa (just within the 300-mile distance limit set by his mother) in 1968.
What was it like for Hirsch to grow up in Skokie in the 1960s? The book shows it was many things, including mingling with his parents’ large, homogeneous network of friends from the old neighborhood, which meant Logan Square and Roosevelt High School. These were people who “grew up during the Depression without money. They thought of themselves as middle-class. Everyone worked. Their morals were flexible. No one had a job—everyone had a hustle… The women were loud, the men shady, and the parties raucous.”
That generational description to some extent captures Hirsch’s own mixed, complicated family. At a time when divorce was treated within the Jewish community as something of a shanda, a source of shame, Hirsch’s childhood involved two fathers, natural and adoptive. The former was Ruby, a compulsive gambler, hard-driving entrepreneur and ladies’ man whose hero was mafia financier Meyer Lansky. The latter was Kurt, a German Jew who was less flamboyant than Ruby but more hot-tempered and quick to punish, and who was proud of his son’s athletic accomplishments but less attuned to his bookish, more sensitive side. Then there was Hirsch’s sister, Arlene, and maternal half-sister Nancy, as well as the paternal half-siblings he barely knew, plus a plenitude of uncles, aunts and cousins, related by blood or close parental friendship. Most of all there was Mom, drama queen and force of nature, who comes across as something of a female Willy Loman: “She believed that people loved you for being somebody else. Our house was like a set. I wonder how much she was staging her own life.”
I grew up only a block or so from Hirsch’s childhood home on Sherwin Avenue in Skokie, attending the same grade and high schools, and so his account of life in “The World’s Largest Village” has that extra zing of recognition. Hirsch captures Skokie’s transient quality, its quality of being not so much a place in itself as a way station on the path of upward mobility. But even those who lack firsthand knowledge of the place will find much to relish and reflect upon in his tragicomic family chronicle. The book’s intermingling of deep feeling and antic irony is as Jewish as the pastrami at Kaufman’s Bagel & Delicatessen on Dempster Street, and is exemplified by the vignette titled “On the Bridge”: “I was going over the story [of his adoption by his stepfather] once again. I sighed, ‘It’s all water under the bridge now.’ Laurie [his wife] said, ‘Yes, Hershey, but you’re still standing on that bridge.’”
“My Childhood in Pieces” is neither a love note nor a poison-pen letter to Skokie, but rather a nuanced nostalgia trip conveying the ambivalence that maybe we all feel toward our hometowns, the setting for our earliest–and sometimes most sharply painful–memories. Hirsch quotes Abraham Lincoln, who described his boyhood home in Indiana as being “as unpoetical as any spot on earth.” Quips the author: “He’d never been to Skokie.” But at the end of this work, he declares with Whitmanesque fervor: “Oh, Skokie. You had engraved yourself on my heart.”
At age seventy-six, Hirsch now lives in Brooklyn and is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Seeking firsthand insights into the book itself and the creative process behind it, I emailed Hirsch at his office in New York, and he graciously consented to answer my questions.
What persuaded you to write a book about your childhood now? Was there something you were trying to capture, or perhaps figure out, about your past? Is it a Jewish “Remembrance of Things Past”? (Which actually is kind of Jewish.)
After my mother died, I had the sudden urge to write down some of the things she said. She had a cutting, streetwise Jewish wit. All the people around me growing up were quick and sharp-tongued. When I wrote down what they said, they seemed to spring alive again.
I adore Proust, especially his idea of involuntary memory. “Remembrance of Things Past” is a bit highfalutin’ for what I was trying to do, but the idea holds. Let’s pull the trigger, a petite madeleine or a poppyseed bagel, and vault back into the past.
The form of “My Childhood in Pieces” is fun, interesting, unique. How do you describe these brief vignettes with a pithy headline and a closing twist—a kind of prose haiku? And why did you choose this approach?
The pieces are structured as micro-chapters, small bursts of prose. Some of them read like haiku, some like mini-essays, others like jokes in a stand-up comedy routine. Each piece has a title, a location or setup and then a turn, a cut, like a sonnet.
I don’t think anyone else has ever written a memoir in this style, but I can’t quite claim the credit because it felt as if the form picked me. Instead of trying to wrench my family into a preexisting prose style, I decided to wrench my prose style to fit my family and friends, the people I grew up with, how they went at things, freestyle, making it up along the way. The pieces made me laugh, and so I kept trying to come up with them. I liked the addictive way they seemed to follow each other. And as they accumulated, I felt the sadness growing underneath the comedy.
Your book has not one but three titles: “My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, A Skokie Elegy.” Is it a memoir or a routine? Is the voice that of a conventional narrator or a Borscht Belt comedian?
It is all of these things, a memoir in the style of a stand-up comedy routine. I am the narrator who channels the stories of my people, like a Borscht Belt comic. My particular brand of comedy has an edgy, underlying sadness, but that’s a hallowed part of Jewish tradition. I’d date it to the early days when Yahweh started playing jokes on us in Genesis. Why else would He have created the world twice?
At one point in the book, you describe yourself as having a “desperate sense of humor.” I really like the phrase, but could you enlarge on it? What role does humor play in your work?
What I mean is that my humor is driven by a sense of trouble, of being troubled. I have a deep-seated need to offload that trouble into jokes and puns, witty comments, clever sayings. My memoir was the first time that I could get my own desperate sense of humor down on paper, to see it operating on the page in real time. It was a thrill.
Your memory for your childhood is remarkable, the way you recall long-ago incidents, feelings, off-the-cuff comments. What’s your secret? How do you make the past seem so immediate, so real?
Thank you. You’ve picked up my project. I didn’t want to look back at the past from a great remove or distance. I didn’t want it to be a “remembrance.” Most memoirs look back at things from a superior or wiser position. I see my book differently. I want to catapult you back into the past so that you experience things the way we experienced them, in real time, one quip or anecdote at a time.
“My Childhood in Pieces” contains a couple of provocative vignettes about the Art Institute, including your experience of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” and Georges Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” It sounds as though visual art, like poetry, served as a portal to a larger world—and also as a kind of escape. Was the museum an important part of your childhood?
I didn’t have any experience of the Art Institute as a child, but it was a crucial part of my adolescence. I used to take the Skokie Swift downtown and head up the stairs between the stone lions. I was entering a sanctuary, a world where art, the arts, mattered. I discovered poetry and painting at pretty much the same time. I saw other ways to live, to make art, to represent experience. It was invaluable.
I was struck by something you wrote in another book, your anthology “The Heart of American Poetry”: “We live in unsettled times. What is America and who are we as a people? How do we understand the dreams and betrayals that have shaped the American experience?” Does “My Childhood in Pieces” reveal your own personal “dreams and betrayals”?
I would say that those are byproducts of my ethnographic approach, my determination to vault back into the past and recapture the textures of experience, of the people I grew up with. I am a sort of child reporter in the book. I leave it to others to make the judgments.
From the outside, the young Edward Hirsch seems quite different from who you are now. Does it seem that way from the inside? Does Skokie feel like your hometown or a foreign country?
From the inside, it feels pretty much the same. I am very in touch with the kid who came from Skokie. It’s totally my hometown.
“My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, A Skokie Elegy”
By Edward Hirsch
Alfred A. Knopf, 276 pages
