I Am My Mother's Daughter: Making Peace with Mom Before It's Too Late by Iris Krasnow, Basic Books, Perseus Book Group, 2006, 216 pages, $25.00

By Donald H. Harrison

LA JOLLA, Calif. — Although people were looking with funny expressions at me yesterday in the Intensive Care Unit's waiting room at Scripps Green Hospital, I continued to read Iris Krasnow's I Am My Mother's Daughter between visits with my father-in-law, Sam Zeiden, who is slowly recovering from recent valve replacement and quadruple bypass surgery.  After all, since 1972 I have watched the relationship develop between  a daughter and her mother, my wife, in my own household, so the issue is not totally foreign to me.

As I understood the author's chief point, it was that daughters need not be trapped in the relationships they had with their mothers back when they were minors.  Once they grow up, and are independent adult women themselves, they can forge new relationships with their mothers.  They can talk with their moms about the issues that bothered them when they were juveniles, forgive them if necessary, and then get to know them as the imperfect, but loving, souls who they really are.  

American women are living longer than ever, into their 80s and 90s, and even higher, which means they may still be alive when their daughters  themselves are classified as senior citizens.  If there are unresolved issues between daughters and their mothers, says Krasnow, they should be dealt with, if possible, sometime before the mothers die, so that both daughter and mom can have the inner peace that comes with closure.  If a mother should die before this process occurs, the daughter may spend the rest of her life feeling remorse that such a conversation never occurred.

It seemed to me that Krasnow made this point too often in her book—so much so that if readers were her daughters, they'd accuse her of constantly nagging them.

Most of the book is filled with the narratives of grown daughters who had this or that issue about the way their mother raised them. What kept me reading the non-fiction work to the end was an interesting narrative Krasnow weaved through the book about the life of her own mother, Helen  During the Nazi period, she was able to leave Poland and pose as a Christian in France, supporting herself by working as an usher in a cinema.  One can imagine how she feared that the Nazi hands that touched her arm would fly to her throat if it was discovered she was a Jew.

In the closing days of the war, her identity was, in fact, revealed. "Two German guards came to my mother's apartment door in Montmartre and ordered her to accompany them," Krasnow wrote. "She fell  to her knees, grabbed a kitchen knife, clutched their legs, and pleaded, 'Here's a knife. If you take me, you must take me dead.' She looked up from the floor and added: 'Maybe you have a daughter my age.  How would you like this done to your child?' The guards left."

Discussing the way her mother raised her, Kransow frequently turned to her Holocaust experiences for an explanation.  She wrote, for example, "When I was six and sobbing on the porch because our family friend Ruth had died, the first time someone I actually knew had died, she scolded me for grieving.  'Stop crying.  Everyone dies," snapped this witness to the Nazi purge of an entire civilization."

Sometimes Krasnow would be nasty to her mother, in retaliation for this or that perceived offense.  Just to upset her mother, she would push her food around her plate without eating much of it.  "My sister and brother and I have heard a thousand times how she scavenged in garbage cans for food  while she was dodging Nazis in France during the German occupation, and so nothing could go to waste in our house."

The experience of being a Second Generation survivor of the Holocaust also was illustrated one summer when Krasnow was working as a camp counselor and her mother phoned to say she was planning to move to a new home.  When Krasnow got to the new place, none of her childhood possessions were there.  Her mother had sold them.  Looking back, Krasnow reasoned that "a woman who fled Europe with nothing but a handful of family pictures doesn't attach sentimental to material goods."  However, Krasnow herself felt very deprived, and now, raising her own children, she throws nothing of theirs away, instead packing  everything into boxes that are stacked in the attic.

Today, writes Krasnow, "My mother is with me, in me, is me, when I cook, feed, kiss, yell, clean and collapse into bed at 9 p.m. I also understand that a mother doesn't have to be a Holocaust survivor to feel overwhelmed and upset a lot of the time. Even the nicest storybook mothers get hissy."