ALL MY MOTHERS AND FATHERS: A Memoir

Poet and novelist Blumenthal's biological parents, New Jersey chicken farmers, gave him away at birth to his uncle and aunt, Holocaust survivors who raised him as their own son in Manhattan. He learned this when he was 10, the year his adoptive mother died. "The truth is," he writes in this memoir, "I have had two of everything—two mothers, two fathers, two siblings, two versions of manhood, two homes. And all I want is to have one." After his adoptive mother's death, his adoptive father remarried an uncaring woman who "may have damaged forever my ability to love as I would choose—my ability, even, to love myself the way an intact human being should." Blumenthal (Dusty Angel; When History Enters the House: Essays from Central Europe) is a deft storyteller, relating his desire for belonging, despite the trying environment, but his memoir is distorted by rage and self-pity. His stepmother, for example, is one of the "women who, cumulatively, never showed me a minute of anything that could conceivably pass for a mother's love." His adoptive father flirts with stereotype, a passive old Jewish man who mutters, "God loves you and so do I," endlessly. With the exception of a sharp account of the author's second wife, the book is cast with ciphers, while the author's own needs and grievances emerge almost too vividly, as when he writes, "Neither man nor animal nor saint nor God... can help me shoulder the burden of my parents." Agent, Lane Zachary. (Mar. 10)