A Mother's Steps: A Meditation on Silence

by Mark Jay Mirsky

A Mother's A Meditation on Silence is the novelist Mark Jay Mirsky's attempt to understand the life of a mother who was reluctant to tell him any details about her family or herself. Concealing much of her strong affection for her son, she began to reveal it after learning that she was dangerously ill. The book tries to un-riddle the silence that Ruth S. Mirsky drew over her childhood, adolescence and the first years of her marriage. She remained a mystery to her son after her death at the age of fifty-six in April of 1968. Why had she spoken so little about her mother and never about her father? The subject had been taboo while she was alive and even Ruth’s husband, Wilfred, the author’s father, was puzzled when asked.
Spending many hours beside her bed in the hospital through her last six months of life brought her son together with his mother in ways that he had never expected. In her final weeks, she asked her son if her illness was fatal, and he had to reveal what no one else had told her. Aged twenty-nine at the moment of his mother’s death, it changed the author’s understanding of reality and fiction. It led to his first immersion in Orthodox Jewish prayer as he assumed the responsibility of mourning for his mother and experienced her return to him in the world of dreams.

A Mother’s Steps describes the process of a son piecing together a narrative of his mother’s life to understand her. He began with the extensive photographic albums his mother kept from the age of thirteen, just after the death of her own mother, Annie Lessler, in October 1925. He interviewed surviving siblings from her family of twelve brothers and sisters and over a period of forty years recorded older cousins’ recollections, gathered photographs, immigration and census records. The book reconstructs the history of Ruth’s father, Joseph Lessler, and his wife, Annie, their passage from Poland and the businesses they managed as new immigrants to America, first in silks on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, then in Annie’s Brooklyn real estate, and finally in fabrics in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The book is not only a history of an American-Jewish family’s immigration, its internal struggles and assimilation into American society; it is also about his mother’s secret her love of theater, her identification with screen heroines, her commitment to social justice. The author searches his own memories, his mother’s letters to him, and the dreams in which she appears to him after her death to explain the powerful bond between them.
The only one of her six sisters to gain a college degree, Ruth S. Mirsky graduated from the Simmons College program in social work and helped run an orphanage in Rhode Island, after which she served at the FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Administration) supervising offices throughout New England. After marrying the author’s father, a young lawyer named Wilfred S. Mirsky, she went to Ironton, Ohio, as a Red Cross disaster worker during the disastrous Ohio floods of 1936-37. Returning to Massachusetts to work for the Jewish Family Welfare Society, she managed her husband’s political career, which included four terms as a state representative in the Massachusetts legislature. Serving in several public capacities, she was appointed in the 1950s for a term as a commissioner on the Commonwealth’s Industrial Accident Board. While proud of his mother’s public life, her son also felt, however, her reserve in expressing affection.
Scanning her albums carefully, the notes she wrote beside them, thinking about photographs that she did not include in their pages revealed much of what she had kept private. They contradicted the previous picture her son had of Ruth, and explained something of the last years of her life when she reached toward him past her self-imposed boundaries. This book tries to construct a new portrait of his mother, asking questions the author might have, if he had known her better.

292 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 3, 2016

Reviews

[Jason Trask · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Mirsky’s A Mother’s Steps: A Meditation on Silence is so personal that there were moments during my reading when I felt I was intruding on a conversation so private that I should turn away. And yet I couldn’t. I was completely pulled in, not only by the story, but by the intensity of the relationship between Mirsky and his mother.

As he attempts to uncover the details of his mother’s life, he works like an archeologist at a dig site, sifting through old letters and photographs for clues concerning who his mother was. He interviews his father, his mother’s siblings and their children (Mirsky’s older cousins), some of whom were his mother’s contemporaries.

One would expect this sort of treatment by an author who had never actually met his mother, or who had only known her as a small child. One of the things that makes this search unique is that Mirsky’s mother actually brought him up. In fact, she didn’t die until Mirsky was nearly 29. At times she seems so cold and unresponsive that I found myself wanting to yell at her to say something. And then I would learn more about her childhood and realize she was giving her children as much as she could.

It’s a very haunting picture he paints of her, all the more so because it is so full of love. His search for his silent mother leaves him standing so naked before the reader that we can't help but admire his bravery. This is a stark portrait of a very deep woman who, despite Mirsky’s loving attempts, takes much of her depth to the grave.

[Y · Rating 5 out of 5]

Today is January 5, 2019. Mark Jay Mirsky's “A Mother’s Steps: A Meditation on Silence” is the first great book I read in 2019. I’m thankful that I read it while my mother is alive. I don’t want the book to end, because it is beautifully written. By “beautifully” I mean a level of intensity and anticipation maintained through the pages, accomplished by both the writer himself and the original letters/photos of his mother. There are essentially two writers in and through this book.

One is writing about the other. The mother is no longer with the son. The son is no doubt a master writer. Just look at the emotional crescendo captured in one sentence on page 230: “It seems as if the Hebrew taboo, her own deep sense of rectitude, the equal affection in which I regarded my father and his generosity, all held her in a frame of idealization without the murderous or erotic implications of the Greek myth.” Despite this, the mother turns out to be the better writer and speaker. I’m glad the master writer does so much to make room for his mother to be heard, without reducing himself to a recorder or collapsing the matrix of his mother to an incredibly funny or sexy woman. This is a difficult book to write, precisely when it appears effortless.

This is also a difficult book to read, because it contains truths that are too painful and too sad. I stick to the last page only because I’m a reader with a high tolerance for emotional pain and sadness. I don’t think I’ll read this book again, of course. Not because it brings to me misery. But because the book is so good that it has fulfilled itself as a play more than as a book. The author has a background in theater and a mother who could play personas since young. I have no trouble engaging with the stories and I have no trouble understanding what I pay attention to. So I know that there is no reason for me to read this book for a second time, and this is the highest respect I can pay to a great non-fiction book. Many return to favorable or important books again and again. I know a female philosophy professor who would read Augustine’s “Confessions” every Christmas. This book is my favorite and it will prove important for me. But because it is not just words I read but also a life presented in the form of a play I have lived guided by the author, I do not plan to go back again unless I need to quote from it someday.

There is an odd feeling that every time I pick up this book, I might be disturbing the happiness of something or someone. Is this an imposter syndrome unintentionally planted by the author? If I am not that close to the people in the book, maybe I shouldn’t care too much. To be fair, the author never raises this aspect and the book seems inviting all the way. It is just that the seriousness and intimacy somehow makes me want to keep a respectful distance by not reading it unless I absolutely need to.

Still, I don’t wish the book to end, despite the emotional pain and sadness. I wish the book could go on, especially as it reaches the end. There are things I wish to know more. For example, how does mother fall in love with father? The author attempted to reconstruct the process from the evidence he had, but I longed for a more robust story where I could see clearly how mother made her decisions. I feel that the author knows more than what he tells me. The book has to end somewhere. But the understanding of his mother has no end, because there will always be new secrets that can be discovered about his mother.

This book is, it seems, not about understanding solely. One writer not only writes about the other, but also pleads for the other. It looks like the son is making a two-fold apology for his mother. A first apology from the son to his mother for the times he “hurt” her, and a second apology from the son to a mysterious “third” audience on behalf of his mother. The first apology gives this book affection, and the second gives it urgency.

The book takes long to write. The son waits over 30 years after the loss of his mother to publish this. Imagine standing up to a sense of urgency, unresolved, for over 30 years.

Without giving spoilers, the author makes two golden observations. One on page 205 about the Oedipus story, the other on page 200 about a sentence from his mother on the relationship with his then girlfriend. Rarely does a book contain one golden observation about humanity. The book contains two.

The book ends with the question: “what do you see of you in me?” The word “you” refers to his mother. On that note, I take the author as retreating to a private space or time where he is once again with his mother. I have only good wishes for them. I wish there will be a time when the mother shall answer the son’s puzzles. By this wish I join the purpose of this book, whatever the author takes that to be.

Now, I’m on my way to talk with my mom.

[Diane Simmons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Mirsky's memoir, A Mother's Steps: A Meditation on Silence, reminds us that every family has something to untangle, to learn, to face. All of us who grew up in a family would do well--if we are to understand ourselves fully-- to someday undertake the sort of exploration that Mirsky makes here, drawing upon letters, diaries, albums and interviews with surviving family members.

Using such clues, Mirsky searches out a deeper acquaintance with the complex young mother he adored as a child, the still-paradoxical woman who died before he was old enough to truly know her as an adult.


Now, in his early seventies, a husband, father and grandfather, a successful writer and college professor, Mirsky is able to dig into the archeology and the psyche of family in the way a child can't imagine doing.

It is not an easy journey that Mirsky undertakes. In researching his mother and her memory he mixes up a potent cocktail of love, misery, and yearning. Opportunities are forever lost, yet grace is belatedly located. His own memory of his mother, he ponders, resembles that created by Tolstoy in his book Childhood. At first Mirsky, who came across that book as he was writing his own, marvels at the author's ability to recall such vivid moments of his own mother. But he learns that Tolstoy could have had no such memories; his mother died when he was two. Mirsky understands that for Tolstoy--as for himself--there is a sense of loss, not just for the mother but "for the child's life" that had sought to intertwined itself with hers.

Mirsky's mother, Ruth, is present during his own childhood, and he shows her, at least in part, as a middle-class, American matron, living in Boston in the years following World War II. She is a college graduate in social work, a capable, "normal" and conventional woman, similar to those featured in the women's magazines of the time.

But she --and the family she came from--was far more complicated than any glossy post-war narratives could allow. Her love for him, for example, though obvious and enduring, also contained much that was hurtful, apparently full of disdain. "I love you," she would snap at him, an insecure, adolescent mess. "But," she would invariably add, "I don't like you."

It was one of many remarks, Mirsky writes, that "seemed deliberately to put me at a distance and to confirm her sense that I was a mistake that she somehow had to bear."

His father, was a Boston politician, given to crushing embraces when his son had pleased him. If his father was angered, it was over in an hour or two. He is a man who has seen horrors: starvation in Pinsk; his uncle, a Jewish leader, murdered; his mother dying before his eyes on the boat to America. Yet he is a buoyant writing in a birthday message that the author now comes across, "a Mirsky is never embarrassed."

But his mother's angers were long, slow burns, a "silent stubborn fury until she made me feel not just anger but disgust and resignation." It would be weeks, or seemed to be, until the boy was graced again with a smile.

His search, primarily, is to discover the source of his mother's enduring, "melancholy," the malaise that flavored her relationship with him and the world.
One place he searches for glimpses of mood is in photographs: Here, for example, is the young woman who will become his mother in a tight fitting dress and smoking a cigarette. She leans against an automobile and in her own hand has labeled the picture, "Sadie Thompson." This remarkable find, however, is a fresh puzzle: does Ruth compare herself to Somerset Maugham's young prostitute, trapped in the South Pacific in the short story "Rain." Or does she--a young woman interested in the theater-- simply wish to emulate glamorous Joan Crawford who played the role of Sadie Thompson in the 1932 movie.

Another photograph suggests more questions than it answers: Here she poses with her father and one of her many sisters, both girls grimacing as if in pain. It is a rare picture: Ruth's father seems to a man about whom the less said the better and his mother is generally "silent" about him. There are no pictures of him in Ruth's own album.

Of Ruth's mother there are more pictures and more stories. She emerges as a powerful matriarch, running the family business, confident that she can do most things better than her hapless husband, who seems to figuratively and a times literally disappear.

Is this, perhaps, is a key to melancholy: the all-powerful mother, the missing-in-action father, the many, many siblings, some of whom raised those younger, some of wom suffered even deeper melancholy than Ruth, ending their own lives.

There is grief and suffering in this exploration, and a sense of pervading loss. But there are bittersweet moments too. Mirsky for example comes across a packet of his own youthful letters to his mother, carefully preserved. The find, he writes, "contradicted the myth that I still half belief, that I was a disappointment." The fact that she has saved every letters shows that, "She saw something about me I did not, but I was too anxious, in awe or her to ask."