Tattoo For A Slave: A Revelatory Historical Memoir―A Jewish Family's Hidden Past in the American South

by Hortense Calisher

A "tattoo" is a bugle call, a summoning that lingers in the ear. Although Hortense Calisher's family eventually migrated north to New York City, the echoes of their days as a slave-owning Jewish family in the South still resonate with this acclaimed author, who uncovers a part of history never before so strongly and tenderly revealed.
Calisher traces her family's years in the South and their transformative move up north, beautifully evoking the mood and texture of the early twentieth century. Her Virginia-born father, a perfume manufacturer, was twenty-two years older than her German-born mother. Marked by longer-than-normal gaps between the generations and conflicts between the mercantile and the scholarly, the "American" and the émigré, her family is characterized by Calisher as "volcanic to meditative to fruitfully dull, and bound to produce someone interested in character, society, and time."

336 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2004

About the author

Hortense Calisher was an American writer of fiction.

Calisher involved her closely investigated, penetrating characters in complicated plotlines that unfold with shocks and surprises in allusive, nuanced language with a distinctively elegiac voice, sometimes compared with Eudora Welty, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Henry James. Critics generally considered Calisher a type of neo-realist and often both condemned and praised for her extensive explorations of characters and their social worlds. She was definitely at odds with the prevailing writing style of minimalism that characterized fiction writing in the 1970s and 1980s and that emphasized a sparse, non-romantic style with no room for expressionism or romanticism. As an anti-minimalist, Calisher was admired for her elliptical style in which more is hinted at than stated, and she was also praised as a social realist and critic in the vein of Honore Balzac and Edith Wharton.

Reviews

[Marilyn Sue Michel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book, and some of it is interesting, but the author was at least ninety when she wrote it, and it is very old-fashioned. She also seems to have lost some coherence, or assumes the reader knows what she's discussing. Hard to follow, especially at the end. In some places it reminds me of "The Evidence of Things Not Seen" by James Baldwin.

[Gr8Reader · Rating 1 out of 5]

Enjoyed the first third of the book.....could not get through the second third.....first time in AGES that I have NOT finished a book I started.