Leah

by Judith Chernaik

in the confused history of the postwar period, certain events signified great and irreversible changes. Often they appeared to bear one meaning at the time, while actually carrying another, which has only become plain with hindsightLeah Lapidus, scholar, feminist, mother of two, has come to London to write a book about nineteenth-century women novelists. She is assaulted instead by memories of her own childhood in Brooklyn just after the Second World War. She hears the voices of her enlightened, sceptical parents, her exhausted teachers and opinionated schoolfriends, arguing in the unmistakable accent of the time; she relives the traumatic events of her sexual and political awakening, shadowed by the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima. In the interest of historical truth, she vows to set down the record of one woman's life, mid-century.Cameos of London in the 1980s alternate with vividly coloured scenes from the past -high school lessons in chlorophyll, Mrs Roosevelt's inaugural address to the United Nations, Coney Island in midsummer - as Leah, now in her late forties, measures current political and sexual realities against the hopes and dreams of the postwar years. And throughout run the two themes that dominated her growing up; the young girl's passionate longing to reform the world; and her equally fervent desire for Harold Rosenfeld, the scowling, bookish, flat-footed editor of the high school newspaper.Beautifully written, comic and moving by turns, Leah is a marvellously inspiriting exploration of desire and impotence in private and public life, of memory and history, of freedom and the bondage of love.

224 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1988