Kirjahaku

When writer Merrill John Gerber is invited to join her husband, a history professor, as he takes a class of American college students in Florence, Italy, she feels terrified at the idea of leaving her comforts, her friends, and her aged mother in California. Her husband tries to assure her that her fear of Italy - and her lack of knowledge of the Italian language - will be offset by the discoveries of travel. This is the tale of a woman who readily admits her fear of travel, a fear that many experience but are embarrassed to admit. When finally she plunges into the new adventure, she describes her experiences in Florence with wit, humour and energy.

Glimmering Girls tells the story of three extraordinary American women during a time of sexual and cultural repression. Francie and her friends Liz and Amanda are college students, coming of age intellectually, emotionally, and physically in a setting where men were forbidden entry to women's dorm rooms, and women were locked into those rooms after curfew. College life for women was governed by one simple, cardinal rule: Marry Before Graduation or Be Lost Forever. Any thrist for adventure was supposed to be satisfied by the occasional panty raid. Francie and friends, however, find all this hard to swallow, and they resist their appointed futures as elementary school teachers and holders of the precious ""MRS"" degree. Doing the unthinkable, the three move off campus to live in a house with three men - Liz's boyfriend and two handsome, mysterious Southern twins who fix foreign cars in a shop off campus. There the young women's rebellion against expectations deepens, and they begin the real-world education of pursuing their dreams. Francie yearns to be a writer and is encouraged by her Russian literature professor. Then she meets Joshua, a talented and dedicated piano student, who presents the ultimate challenge: does she maintain her ""virtue,"" or give in to her sexual desires, finally breaking fully free of repressive ""respectability""? Ultimately, Francie, Liz, and Amanda each find a way to live fully at a time when their entire culture seemed arrayed against them.

In ""The Victory Gardens of Brooklyn"", Merrill Joan Gerber, so often applauded for her pure and natural prose, illuminates the sorrows and triumphs of three generations of sisters from an American Jewish family. Rachel and Rose, who come to America from Poland, discover their fates in New York's Lower East Side, where ""the streets are paved with gold."" Rachel's daughters, Ava, Musetta, and Gilda, live the passionate drama of their family's destiny while the world fights two wars. In war and peace the men they love, their husbands and sons, bring them both ecstasy and bitter grief. Musetta's daughters, Issa and Iris, bring the story to its poignant close at the end of World War II. With a delicate touch yet piercing insight, Gerber explores the yearnings, loves, and struggles of women who try to adapt the Jewish rituals of the ""old country"" to the requirements of the new world. Ava marries young to escape the wrath of her stepfather, while his favorite daughters, Musetta and Gilda, begin a battle of wills that will last a lifetime. Musetta, beautiful but troubled by jealousies and anger, taunts shy and delicate Gilda, who is anguished that the man destined to marry her falls in love with her sister. In this epic tale, Gerber's unerring pen explores, with forthrightness and compassion, a mosaic of family life in all its entanglements, revelations, and victories.

These powerful essays share critical moments of a writer's life: scenes from sixty years of passionate married love; suicides faced and suicide contemplated; trauma at the DMV; a night lost searching for a harpsichord in the mountains of Florence, Italy; the tale of a beloved cousin whose plane is shot down by Japanese Zeros; and a precious friendship between two women writers derailed by the poisons of religion and politics. In the titular essay (included in Best American Essays 2023) a food bank, assuaging the pandemic's terrors with gifts of food and prayers, becomes a portal for intimate confidences entrusted to us by a voice of unspoiled authenticity and perennial vigor.