Who She Was is the personal feat of journalist, six-time novelist and Columbia University professor Samuel Freedman. This blend of novel and memoir tells the story of Freedman’s late mother, Eleanor Hatkin, as she grows up in a Jewish Bronx neighborhood in the 1940s. Having perused the newspapers and movies of his mother’s time, her writings, medical files and college transcripts, Freedman portrays his imperfect and beloved mother with a nostalgic accuracy that stabs at the reader.
He shuns the label of memoir and in doing so he finds the woman he had been detached from his entire life. Who She Was reads as a work of nonfiction with Eleanor Hatkin as the protagonist. She is a flirtatious and plucky valedictorian who never lives up to her own dreams, who gives up her chance for love and who dies at age fifty from breast cancer. It is with faithfulness and heartache that Freedman describes his mother’s life as peaking at age seventeen, and the vanity, society and decisions that defined her life.
Throughout Who She Was, Jewish words, songs and phrases echo the ethnic identity of the Hatkin household, a force that Freedman’s mother could not escape in her lifetime. She cheered when Bess Meyerson became the first Jewish Miss America yet she was embittered by her mother’s intolerance of her goyum (non-Jewish) lover until her death. Freedman grieves the fact that his mother chose to harbor resentment rather than pursue her love. He reminds us that our lives, like the life of his mother, are the products of time and circumstance but also our character.
With the precision of a journalist, Samuel Freedman brings to life a bygone era. He invokes the Jewish tenement communities of the Bronx hit by the Great Depression, the wait for the soldiers’ return during the Second World War, and the social revolution of the 60s and 70s. While the world was changing, Eleanor Hatkin read works by Upton Sinclair, listened to radio programs like “The Make Believe Ballroom” and watched “The Nazi Murder Mills” which exposed Nazi atrocities for the first time. In examining the world through his mother’s eyes, through the books she read and the movies she watched, Samuel Freedman, a man well into his fifties, finds maternal closeness, a need that can be stifled but not ignored.
In every perfectly researched detail, in each reasoned speculation there is an affection and longing for a mother Samuel Freedman had never known. Freedman does not even shy away from his mother’s sexuality, hoping to find in her relationships with men, with a Jewish storeowner from Borough Park, an Italian neighborhood boy, a cheating podiatrist, a man four years her junior and his own father a sense of the woman who would become his mother. He paints a woman who was embarrassed by mediocrity, who was proud and who was worldly. Not unlike the teenager who once distanced himself from his mother, Eleanor Hatkin was an independent spirit.
By holding up the life of an unknown and seemingly ordinary woman, Freedman imbues it with significance. Through painstaking research, he has found the moments where his mother had been happiest, and in the pages of what he calls an incomplete and fragmented collection he preserves the zest of her life that would otherwise have been lost to memory.
Still, Who She Was does not gush with the typical sentimentality and overstatement of memoirs. Instead it resonates with the themes of love and loss, as they occur in the real world. It is poignant when read as a narrative of a woman’s life warped by insecurity and social restraint, but made more so by Freedman’s candid delivery. Artfully divided into becoming, loving, waiting, leaving and dying, Who She Was is an elegant portrait of a fleeting life.
