15% off
Random House USA Inc Hardback English
My Childhood in Pieces
A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy
Save 15%
-
From the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of an aspiring middle-class Jewish family whose hard-boiled American values and wit were the forge of a poet's coming-of-age. My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water. . . . They didnt expect an entire book, Hirsch says in the prologue to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In microchapterssometimes only a single scathing sentence longwith titles like Call to Breakfast, Pay Cash, The Sorrow of Manly Sports, and Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue, Eddies gambling father, Ruby, son of an iron smelter, schools him and his sister in blackjack; Eddies mom bangs pots to wake the kids to a breakfast of cold cereal; Uncle Bob, in the collection business, is heard threatening people on the phone; and nobody suffers fools. In this household, Eddie learned to jab with his left and cross with his right, never to kid a kidder, and how to sneak out at night. Affectionate, deadpan, and exuberant, steeped in Yiddishkeit and Midwestern practicality, Hirschs laugh-and-cry performance animates a heartbreaking odyssey, from the cradle to the day he leaves home, armed with sorrow and a huge store of poetic wit.
From the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of an aspiring middle-class Jewish family whose hard-boiled American values and wit were the forge of a poet's coming-of-age.
My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water. . . . They didnt expect an entire book, Hirsch says in the prologue to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In microchapterssometimes only a single scathing sentence longwith titles like Call to Breakfast, Pay Cash, The Sorrow of Manly Sports, and Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue, Eddies gambling father, Ruby, son of an iron smelter, schools him and his sister in blackjack; Eddies mom bangs pots to wake the kids to a breakfast of cold cereal; Uncle Bob, in the collection business, is heard threatening people on the phone; and nobody suffers fools. In this household, Eddie learned to jab with his left and cross with his right, never to kid a kidder, and how to sneak out at night.
Affectionate, deadpan, and exuberant, steeped in Yiddishkeit and Midwestern practicality, Hirschs laugh-and-cry performance animates a heartbreaking odyssey, from the cradle to the day he leaves home, armed with sorrow and a huge store of poetic wit.