Lerner has enjoyed a brilliant academic career, a pioneer who virtually created her own discipline—women's history—and wrote some of the central texts in the field (such as The Creation of Patriarchy). But she came to scholarship quite late; she was over 40 when she earned her bachelor's degree. Before that she was a refugee, a divorcée, the mother of two children, a political activist and a member of the Communist Party. Now in her early 80s, Lerner looks back not on the years of prominence but on those early decades that shaped her thought and made her life's work possible. Born into a well-to-do Viennese Jewish family, she was imprisoned by the Nazis after the anschluss, narrowly escaping to America and leaving her family behind. Her immediate family survived the Holocaust, but Lerner was never again to see her mother, who died in Europe of multiple sclerosis. The story of her mother's amazing flowering as an artist and tragic death is the emotional heart of the book; its intellectual core is Lerner's account of her political life in the United States. Unlike many ex-Communists who recount their past with guilt and shame, Lerner maintains that, despite the compromises and blindness of those years, the party spoke to what was best in her nature—her commitment to social justice and racial equality. The hot-pink blossoms of the fireweed, which can only bloom on burnt-over ground, provide an apt metaphor for this memoir, one certain to find a deserved place in every collection of indispensable works of women's history. 24 b&w illus. (May)
Forecast:This will be reviewed, especially in academic and women's studies periodicals. Students of women's history and movements of social justice will look for this.
