And the Bridge is Love

Faye Moskowitz’s AND THE BRIDGE IS LOVE (Beacon Press, 1991, $17.95), is a collection of non-fiction essays about life in Michigan during the Depression. Drawing on the constant alienation she experienced growing up as a Jew in a non-Jewish area, Moskowitz shares the intimate details of her family’s intergenerational conflicts. In a series of vignettes, enchanting in their simplicity, Moskowitz stays close to the emotional bone, most pointedly when she writes about her daughter’s impending marriage.

“Six weeks before the wedding, when the time came for out -of-town invitations to be sent, my depression deepened once more,” she writes. “I felt as if I were publishing the news of my failure as a Jewish parent. “If I had only done this or that differently. I reasoned, my daughter would not now be marrying a gentile.”

Using memory, which, she writes, “can chalk in childhood with the pastels of nostalgia — or cut like whiplash into the face of sentimentality.” Moskowitz’s stories chart her own maturation and growing positive feelings about her Jewish identity.