Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life

Samuel G. Freedman

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*Second Edition, with a new Introduction by Kelley McMasters

When Samuel G. Freedman was nearing fifty, the same age at which his mother died of breast cancer, he realized that he did not know who she was. Of course, he knew that Eleanor had been his mother, a mother he kept at an emotional distance both in life and after death. He had never thought about the entire life she lived before him, a life of her own dreams and disappointments. And now, that ignorance haunted him.

So Freedman set out to discover the past, and Who She Was is the story of what he found-the story of a young woman's ambitions and yearnings, of the struggles of her impoverished immigrant parents, and the ravages of the Great Depression, Word War II and the Holocaust.

It is also the story of a middle-aged son wracked with regret over the disregard he had shown as a teenage boy for a terminally ill mother, and as an adult incapable for decades of visiting her grave. By asking all the questions he had not asked when his mother was alive, Freedman is able to find peace with his regrets.

Researched as a history, written like a novel, Who She Was brings a compassionate yet unflinching eye to the American Jewish experience. It recaptures the working-class borough of the Bronx with its tenements and pushcarts, its union halls and storefront synagogues and rooftop tar beaches. In such a world, Eleanor Hatkin came of age, striving for education, for love, for a way out.

Book Details

Publisher: Sager Group LLC
Publish Date: Feb 14th, 2025
Pages: 286
Language: English
Edition: undefined - 0002
Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 0.64in - 0.85lb
EAN: 9781958861455
Categories: • Memoirs• Jewish• Subjects & Themes - Emigration & Immigration

About the Author

Freedman, Samuel G.: - Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning author, journalist, and professor. A former reporter and columnist for The New York Times and a professor at Columbia University, he is the author of ten acclaimed books. The most recent of them, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, won the 2024 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, an award previously bestowed on such authors as John Hersey and Isabel Wilkerson.Freedman's previous books include Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School (1990); Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church (1993); The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (1996); Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (2000); Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life (2005); and Letters To A Young Journalist (2006); and Breaking The Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Game and Changed the Course of Civil Rights (2013).Small Victories was a finalist for the 1990 National Book Award and The Inheritance was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. Upon This Rock won the 1993 Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. Four of Freedman's books have been listed among The New York Times' Notable Books of the Year. Jew vs. Jew won the National Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2001 and made the Publishers Weekly Religion Best-Sellers list. Freedman was a staff reporter for The New York Times from 1981 through 1987. From 2004 through 2008, he wrote the paper's "On Education" column, winning first prize in the Education Writers Association's annual competition in 2005. From 2006 through 2016, Freedman wrote the "On Religion" column, receiving the Goldziher Prize for Journalists in 2017 for a series of columns about Muslim-Americans that had been published over the preceding six years.A tenured professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Freedman was named the nation's outstanding journalism educator in 1997 by the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2012, he received Columbia University's coveted Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. Freedman's class in book-writing has developed more than 110 authors, editors, and agents, and it has been featured in Publishers Weekly and the Christian Science Monitor. Freedman holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which he received in May 1977. He lives in New York with his wife, Christia Chana Blomquist.

Praise for this book

"Samuel Freedman's Who She Was is a tribute to both its subject-the power of motherhood and the mysteries of familial love-and its readers; beautifully written, deeply moving, this memoir is not only a delightful read, but it is also a testament to how every life is a living and memorable embodiment of the past and history. One feels the author's affection and wonderment for his subject on every page." -Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

"To this project, Mr. Freedman brings the tools of a veteran journalist and careful historian. He has succeeded brilliantly in finding out who his mother was and how she lived; the result is a book that is deeply satisfying to read, as close to time traveling as most of us will ever experience. Who She Was takes the reader into a lost world, the world of Depression-era poverty as experienced by Jewish immigrants in the Bronx. Without sentimentality or fantasy, without relying on fictional techniques, Mr. Freedman carefully constructs a neighborhood and a way of life that is now forgotten... Freedman did indeed find his mother, did bring her to life and find out how she lived, the choices and mistakes she made. His journalistic and historical search has brought him a measure of peace. His readers can only admire the way he has unearthed the lost world of his mother and wish we could all know our parents and grandparents as he has come to know his." -Diane Ravitch, The New York Sun

"Terrifically intimate... A son's story, a Jewish story, an American story." -Kirkus Reviews

"Journalists are taught to look out the window rather than in the mirror. In many ways it is a blessing of the job, this notion that it is our business to poke around in other people's lives and tell their stories, not our own. Yet when a journalist at the top of his craft brings skills honed over three decades to the story in the mirror, the results can be breathtaking... What a fine book it is."-The Capital Times

"Freedman does terrific work in re-creating the half century that his mother's life encompassed. The pages crackle with sensory detail and nuanced historical context."

-Barbara Lloyd McMichael, The Seattle Times

"Freedman, a skillful writer, relates his mother's story with considerable creativity and warmth. His research led him to new-found admiration of his mother evidenced by his affectionate depiction of her joyous years in the Bronx as a teenager and during World War II... Thorough research enabled him to paint a vivid picture of what life was like for Jews during that era... This book is an auspicious addition to Freedman's four previous ones." -The Jerusalem Post