Revelation at the food bank Essays

Merrill Joan Gerber

Book - 2023

"These powerful essays share critical moments of a writer's life: scenes from sixty years of passionate married love; suicides faced and suicide contemplated; trauma at the DMV; a night lost searching for a harpsichord in the mountains of Florence, Italy; the tale of a beloved cousin whose plane is shot down by Japanese Zeros; and a precious friendship between two women writers derailed by the poisons of religion and politics. In the titular essay (included in Best American Essays 2023) a food bank, assuaging the pandemic's terrors with gifts of food and prayers, becomes a portal for intimate confidences entrusted to us by a voice of unspoiled authenticity and perennial vigor."--

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814.54/Gerber
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Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor New Shelf 814.54/Gerber (NEW SHELF) Due Jan 7, 2025
Subjects
Genres
Essays
Published
Montclair, New Jersey : Sagging Meniscus Press [2023]
Language
English
Main Author
Merrill Joan Gerber (author)
Physical Description
195 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781952386701
  • Revelation at the food bank
  • True believer: my friendship with Cynthia Ozick
  • Letters home from college: the making of a writer
  • At the DMV
  • A life in letters
  • The found desk
  • My suicides
  • Why I must give up writing
  • The harpsichord on the mountain
  • The lost airman: a memoir of World War Two
  • On the edge of action.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Novelist Gerber (Beauty and the Breast) brings together intimate personal essays in this stirring compendium. The hilarious title essay weaves an account of how Gerber found unexpected community at a church's food pantry ("They give me gifts, they welcome me.... I'm a Jewish girl, but I've never known the rewards of religion. Is it too late?") with reflections on the small annoyances that accumulated over her 62-year marriage ("Why does he put so much cream cheese on his bagel?"). Several pieces investigate how grief ripples through families, including "My Suicides," which discusses how Gerber's relatives coped with the suicides of her cousin and her abusive brother-in-law, and "The Lost Airman," which delves into her grandmother's struggle to accept the death of another of Gerber's cousins, who was "shot down by Japanese Zeros over New Guinea" during WWII. Gerber is a witty and astute observer with a keen eye for detail ("As I sat there facing three lanes of oncoming traffic, as I waited numbly for a Highway Patrol Officer to reach me, I gathered up some little glittering pieces of my windshield and put them in my pocket for a souvenir," she writes of the aftermath of a highway car crash). Elevated by Gerber's wry voice and crystalline prose, this impresses. (Dec.)

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