THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 20, 1996 TAG: 9610200239
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LYNN DEAN HUNTER
LENGTH: 72 lines
IN MY FATHER'S GARDEN
A Daughter's Quest for a Spiritual Life
BY KIM CHERNIN
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 180 pp. $17.95.
A Marxist ideologue discovers she has the gift of healing hands. This improbable occurrence is the subject of In My Father's Garden: A Daughter's Quest for a Spiritual Life, radical feminist Kim Chernin's mid-life memoir about her awakening spiritual sensibility.
A psychoanalyst and writer in California, Chernin is best known for her works on eating disorders (The Obsession, The Hungry Self) and gender identity (Crossing the Border), writings that have taken a prominent place in the literature of contemporary women's studies.
Thirteen years ago Chernin examined the influence of her firebrand Marxist mother in In My Mother's House. She wrote then: ``My mother and I seemed born to revolution, that was the business of my mother's house.''
In My Father's Garden chronicles Chernin's impressions of her father and his influence upon her. But it is not a memoir. Chernin spares little space re-creating life from memory. Rather, she loosely links musings about her spiritualism and the confusion it caused with musings about the part that her father might have played in forming this aspect of her character.
If Chernin's objective is to complete the family portrait begun with In My Mother's House, then she gets off to an appalling start. ``Undoubtedly it is too bad that we are not all people like my mother,'' she writes, ``but the fact remains that some of us are people like my father.''
In ``My Father and I,'' the first of the book's three sections, Chernin sets out to discover her father's deeper, spiritual leanings, but she has very little to go on. She supposes her father must have learned Hebrew as a boy. She reviews his attention to humble tasks, such as washing the dog, looking for a pious bent. Finally, she selects his love of gardening as evidence of ``sensitivity to an unseen order.''
``A garden is a place where a sense of kinship with nature or with a force larger than oneself is easily encountered,'' she writes. ``There is no need to weed these intimations out or fit them into the pattern of more formal ideologies.''
In the second section, ``A Woman is Dying,'' the author recounts her visits with a terminally ill client. This is the heart of the book. Chernin watches her own hands redden and glow with a healing heat:
``I remember the family story about my grandmother and her healing hands. I have heard that my mother, in the wildness of her grief when my sister was dying, took her to faith healers. This was thought to be a reversion to the ways of the old country. My own hands have always been useless, dropping things, unable to thread needles, tie knots. Now these hands have become knowing, autonomous, indifferent to my confusion. They have found their work, and they are getting on with it.''
In the third section, ``Root and Branch,'' Chernin attempts to integrate her new experiences and her lifelong Marxist-feminist convictions. This takes some imagination. While she explores avenues of faith, including a trek to Germany to hear the teachings of a guru, Chernin invents conversations with her late father. She conjures him at her side in a Berkeley, Calif., bookstore during a lecture on the Divine Mother, for example, and bounces new ideas off of him.
Like Marxism, Chernin tells her father, the possibility of divine intervention gives humankind hope enough to act together for a better future. An honest mind must ``suspend disbelief in the name of possibility,'' she says. It doesn't matter whether or not an idea is true as long as it gives people hope.
By book's end, Chernin's father, dead 27 years, is stroking his moustache, considering her argument. MEMO: Lynn Dean Hunter is a writer who lives in Virginia Beach and
teaches memoir writing at the Norfolk Senior Center. by CNB