My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy

Synopsis

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 didn&’t expect an entire book,&” Hirsch says in the &“prologue&” to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In microchapters—sometimes only a single scathing sentence long—with titles like &“Call to Breakfast,&” &“Pay Cash,&” &“The Sorrow of Manly Sports,&” and &“Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue,&” Eddie&’s gambling father, Ruby, son of a white metal smelter, schools him and his sister in blackjack; Eddie&’s 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, Hirsch&’s 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.

Copyright:

2025

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

Book Size:

288 Pages

ISBN-13:

9780593802830

Related ISBNs:

9780593802823, 9798217077984, 9798217078288

Publisher:

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Date of Addition:

06/03/25

Copyrighted By:

Edward Hirsch

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Poetry, Biographies and Memoirs, Literature and Fiction, Parenting and Family

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.