In 2007, Herb and Fritzi learned that their temple would be hiring a sofer – a scribe –  to create a new Torah, and that devoted congregants would have the opportunity to assist in the inscription of a letter into the holy scroll. As active congregants and volunteers at the temple, such an honor appealed very much to Herb and Fritzi, and soon they were notified that they would be among those allowed to help with a letter. They were asked to select a day on the following year’s calendar to assist the sofer. Among the dates available was November 9, 2008. As survivors of the Holocaust, Herb and Fritzi knew the significance of November 9. On November 9, 1938, Nazis unleashed their fury on Jews, Jewish business and synagogues throughout Germany and Austria . It was a pogrom of uncontrolled violence that carried on through the night and into the next day and is remembered by the world as Krystallnacht. Herb and Fritzi thought that aiding in the creation of something new and holy on the seventieth anniversary of such unspeakable destruction might give them a little closure.

So almost a year later, on a Sunday afternoon in November, joined by Bob, Evie, Gustie and Henry, Herb and Fritzi went to Temple Israel on 75th Street and Lexington to make their mark. When they arrived, they were told the letter they would write into the Torah would be the Lamed. Before that moment, they had no idea which letter they would be assigned to inscribe. It could have been any. But it was a Lamed, the 12th of 22 letters, the heart of the alphabet. The Lamed that Herb and Fritzi inscribed was found in Numbers 36:12 and it began the word lenashim, which means, “to the women.”

In the early evening, after arriving home after this momentous event, Herb and Fritzi received a call from Katie and Joe. They were in a taxi cab and were heading downtown on West End Avenue toward the hospital. Their baby – who had been expected a few days prior and who was of as yet unknown gender – was on its way.

That night, as Herb and Fritzi slept, and as Katie labored and moaned and yelled at her husband – Mark and Mindy got into their car, and they headed south on the Pacific Coast Highway toward the hospital. Their baby –who wasn’t expected for a few more days and who was of as yet unknown gender –  was on its way.

On Monday, November 10, at 4:33 am in New York, Joe and Katie’s baby girl was born. They named her Eleanor, or Ella.

That same day, at 9:46 am in Los Angeles, Mark and Mindy’s baby girl was born. They named her Lila.

Not many people can celebrate the birth of both a granddaughter and a great granddaughter on the same day. But for Herb and Fritzi, the occasion held especially special significance: the day before they had drawn into the Torah the letter Lamed, which corresponds to the English letter “L.” Then within hours they welcomed two new children into their family – Lila and Ella. Lamed women.

It only dawned upon Herb and Fritzi days later that their own mothers, respectively named Leontyna and Lily, were Lamed women too.

You can measure the success of your life in many ways. Here’s one: Herb and Fritzi came to this country in 1939, Austrian refugees who barely escaped Hitler’s wrath, survivors who moved to an unfamiliar country fleeing horror but intent on living in hope. They did it by building a family and instilling in it a respect for the traditions and values that so many in Europe had sacrificed so much for. And then almost 69 years later – and 70 years to the day after Krystallnact – Herb and Fritzi were responsible for helping to replenish the world with happy, healthy, sweet and pink, Jewish baby girls.

Talk about an American dream.

I wrote a memoir called “If You Knew Suzy” and it gets savaged in this coming Sunday’s New York Times Book Review.  The review, by Dana Jennings, considers three memoirs that involve cancer, including mine—a chronicle of my 60-year-old mother’s death, as well as the year I took off from the Wall Street Journal to report on her life. Mr. Jennings, an editor at the Times who blogs about his own prostate cancer, calls my book “a magazine article that got out of hand,”  “self-absorbed” and “like a dreary episode of ‘Sex and the City.’” And that’s just in the first sentence!

This is my first book. When it debuted in late April, it was met with favorable mention from publications including People, Elle, Slate, New York Observer and Vanity Fair. The Journal excerpted it, as did Psychology Today and Harper’s Bazaar. It got one middling-to-bad review, in the Los Angeles Times. Once I got the sense that the review was fairly negative, I stopped reading it. If Angelina Jolie doesn’t read her bad press, I decided, I don’t have to, either. But the New York Times piece I read entirely. It was short, the mention of my book even shorter—reductive, really, misrepresenting the content of my book in the apparent service of tossing as many nasty barbs as possible into 212 words. When I got an advance copy of the review last week, my sister and her family were visiting. “Who cares what the New York Times says?” my 8-year-old nephew, Zack, said to me. “I don’t even know a single person who reads the newspaper.”

Oh, kids. They say the darnedest things, and often the most incisive. The readership of newspapers is dwindling and money-saving cuts to arts coverage is a difficult reality for the book trade, because the success or failure of a book by an unknown, first-time author rests largely on the media coverage it can attract.  For this reason, I lobbied hard to get my book considered for review by editors at the Times. When I learned that my book would, in fact, be reviewed, I was thrilled. “Even a bad review in the Times is better than no review at all,” I was told by many. They should reiterate that to the gal whose dead mother is to be called “vain, materialistic and manipulative” by Mr. Jennings. (P.S. She was all that, and a bag of chips.)

A complicating factor of newspaper criticism is how editors choose reviewers. Often, they pick writers who, based on their own writing, life experience or both, will come to the books they are being asked to review with an opinion if not an agenda. The woman who reviewed my book in the Los Angeles Times had written a memoir about her murdered father. And presumably Mr. Jennings was selected to review my book because he writes for the paper’s web site about living with cancer. None of this is to say that two randomly selected reviewers wouldn’t hate my book. But it raises the question of whether the reader is served by critics selected for their biases. (Speaking of Mr. Jennings’ oeuvre: Should a man who wrote in the Times, “Yes, my erectile dysfunction is still a work in progress, but I don’t feel diminished; I don’t feel less a man. My voice is still as deep as a well, my eyes a steely blue” be calling anyone “self-absorbed”?)

Likely to expand the volume of books that can be covered, editors group together books they can present as representative of a genre. Such is the case with Mr. Jennings’s review, which says, “Rosman doesn’t offer many insights in this memoir of grief. [Joan] Didion, in ‘The Year of Magical Thinking,’ lets us peer into the Möbius strip of the obsessed and grieving mind, admits to us that ‘grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves.” I haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading the other two books included in the review with mine, but “Suzy” is not a grief book. It’s a book about relationships among women (mothers, daughters, sisters) and a look at the enormous and meaningful role that strangers can play in our lives. It’s about the impact on patients, family and hospitals of doctors who lack of compassion—and those who show it in abundance. It’s about the ways we don’t know people we’re close to. Mr. Jennings can hate my book, but I’d prefer if he didn’t try to shoehorn it into a space it doesn’t fit, and then criticize it for not fitting. Might I add: comparing all memoirs that involve themes of death against Ms. Didion’s is like measuring the work of every carpenter against Jesus Christ’s.

For all the effort of Times’ editors to assign my book to be reviewed by someone with whom the themes might resonate (for better or worse), Mr. Jennings just didn’t “get” my book. He describes me as “chirpily” laying out on the first page of the book that the day my mom died my sister and I took her credit cards and went shopping. Then he castigates me for not telling the “white-boned truth.” I’m not sure how much more truthful you can get than admitting you shopped on your mom’s dime before her body was cold. And I told that truth for a few reasons: first, to explode the taboos surrounding death—to defy the judgment of people like Mr. Jennings who have decided there is a right and proper thing to do on the day the suffering ends for someone you love. Also, as readers who complete the first chapter will see, the shopping spree led me into an interaction that helped me to recognize, on that most significant day, the blessings of loss. Sometimes we end up exactly where we need to be. For me on the day my mom died, that was in a makeup store in Tucson. (Also? Would Mr. Jennings ever describe a male writer as chirpy? I don’t think so either. But I’m not hiding from my chirpiness. And only the New York Times could criticize a writer for using a little humor and optimism when deconstructing the impact of death on a family.)

My sister and I coped with the long and terrible strain of Mom’s illness in ways that are influenced by the popular culture we live in. I’m guessing there are a lot of women—and men—out there like us, and like mom: Masses of contradictions who are spiritual and materialistic, warm and moody, nurturing and selfish. My mother was not one-dimensional, nor was my portrayal of her. With his quick dismissal of her and a book that describes how a family of women faced a matriarch’s life and death, it’s Mr. Jennings who comes off as one-dimensional in a haughtiness that borders on sexism.

We live in perhaps the most materialistic culture in the world. Taking an honest, hard look at how things shape our lives and psyches is not silly or vapid. Tim O’Brien helped us understand the conflict in Vietnam based on the things that soldiers carried. Part of what “Suzy” does is examine the impact of vanity, physical beauty, athletic achievement and clothes on a woman’s life. These are totems in the contemporary lives of plenty of people in today’s society. That you care about looking beautiful and want a dress you saw in a magazine doesn’t mean you have no inner life. In fact, possessions can very much reflect inner life which is exactly why I spent time reporting on the origin of my mother’s treasured glass collection, her house, her clothes. As I wrote in my memoir, “The things a person leaves behind become markers of a life once lived, like a Swiss Army knife inscription on a wooden rafter: Mom Was Here.” Does Mr. Jennings consider the ancient Egyptian practice of burying the dead with their finery and jewels—connecting life and death—superficial? If so, that’s not very P.C. or Timesian.

This week, just a few days before the actual publication of the Times review, my book was discussed by dozens of bloggers as a selection of the “From Left 2 Write” online book club. On their Web pages, women dissected my story thoughtfully. Not all loved it. But free of space constraints, and the need to manufacture common themes among barely similar books, these writers managed to say something about relationships among women, and to material things.  On the blog, “West of the Loop,” Emily Paster describes how “dressing nicely and wearing make-up reminds me that I am an adult with a graduate degree and opinions on the latest Supreme Court opinion, even if I do spend my days satisfying the whims of young children….Our clothes are the way we tell the world who we are.” Even as the Internet destroys the printed word, it may just save the written one.

*Disclosure: When I first read of Mr. Jennings’ cancer, I wrote and mailed to him a letter sending him my best wishes. I guess I should have asked Ms. Didion for help in crafting it.

Grandma had three wishes.

The first: She wanted me to mention that Mom had been fluent in French and proficient in Russian. When the Goldberg family would travel abroad for the annual meeting of the International Astronomical Union, Grandma said, my mom, as a college student, would serve as a translator for some of the French and Russian scientists. “She was even translating Russian into French,” Grandma told me, breathless with a mother’s pride. I remember that this surprised me not because I ever really doubted that she was proud of her daughter but because Gram had never been an emotionally demonstrative person.

I appreciated the sweetness of the request and I told Grandma I’d think about it. But I was skeptical: No way was my mom discussing stars and nebulae in three languages. Ultimately, I decided that I would leave out the anecdote, but insert references to Mom’s lingual skills. I am so glad Grandma prompted me to do so because it compelled me to dig up some old letters Mom had written during her junior year in college when she studied abroad. The letters were funny and I ended up quoting one in the book, in what is now among my favorite passages.

Second, Grandma objected to this description:

Grandma still lives in Tucson. As I write this, she is approaching her 95th birthday. She is an exceptional woman, and not just because she has lived so long and survived so much without losing her vim. She is a spitfire, a trailblazer, a broad. She went to college during the Depression—a time when paying tuition for a girl’s education was thought of as a waste of a family’s money. She was a working mother—employed first as a Phys Ed teacher, then as a high school counselor—in the 1950s and 60s. She then became as a travel agent. She quit in her early 80s but got bored quickly and returned to work. She sent her clients a flier: “I’M BACK!” it began. “I couldn’t STAND retirement!” Until her late 80s, Grandma led groups (and not senior citizen groups) on rafting trips through Alaska, safaris in South Africa and hiking trips in Peru. She has traveled the world, visiting nearly every country on six continents. She hasn’t made it to Antarctica but she did boat down the Amur River in Siberia when she was 85.

“I think you kids have a different definition of ‘broad,’ than people of my generation do,” she said as we spoke on the phone last summer; she in her apartment at the Forum, her assisted living facility in Tucson, me on my sunlit back porch in Tuxedo Park, New York.

“When I say ‘broad,’ I think of a feisty, strong, take-no-guff Mae-West-type,” I told Gram.

“I think of a street walker,” Grandma replied. “During the Depression, there would be drunk women hanging out no street corners with smudged lipstick and cigarettes hanging from their lips,” she said. “They were ‘broads.’”

Oops. I apologized for referring to her as a hooker (in print, no less) and promised to make the change: “Broad” became “salty gal.”

Finally, Grandma asked that I reconsider this paragraph:

Mom used to get furious when she would find a huge jug of scotch underneath the kitchen sink in Grandma’s apartment at the assisted living facility. “You could fall and break your hip, Mother!” my teetotaling Mom would say to my boozing grandma. Eventually, when she was about 88, Grandma agreed that whiskey might be a bit much for a woman of her age. So she switched to wine. “What’s your favorite kind of wine?” I’ll ask her before coming to the nursing home to hang out with her and her friends during Happy Hour (which starts at 4 PM on Fridays if you’re looking for a raucous scene). “The kind with a screw-top!” is her standard answer.

Grandma: I am not  a big drinker.
Katie: Did you or did you not until very recently keep a jug of scotch underneath your kitchen sink, including since you moved into the Forum?
Grandma: I did.
Katie: Do you or do you not look forward all week to the “Happy Hour” celebrations held at the Forum on Friday evenings?
Grandma: I never have more than two glasses of wine a night.
Katie: Are you 95 years old and approximately 95 pounds?
Grandma: I’m 94.

The paragraph stayed, minus the words “my boozing grandma.”

I hadn’t anticipated any of these specific concerns, though I did suspect that she would have some. Mostly, I assumed she would take issue with my including this paragraph:

She is outspoken, describing herself and her experiences in declarative sentences. Of her abilities as a golfer—she rarely scored below 110—she would say, “I’m rotten!” Of her tendency to look askance at anything she considers wasteful spending—when Lizzie and I would stay at her house, she would pour the backwash from our nearly empty diet Coke cans into a pitcher and serve it to dinner guests—she’d say, “I’m a skinflint!” She loves to be provocative, to blurt out things you wouldn’t expect from a little old lady. Of the hoopla that surrounded President Clinton’s oral dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, she said, “I don’t see what the big deal is. When I was growing up, we called that necking!” She said this at Thanksgiving dinner, sitting at Mom’s dining room table alongside a random group of Pilates students none of us knew well. In unison, Lizzie and I yelped “GRANDMA!!!!” with a mixture of horror and bemusement. Mom nearly choked on her turkey.

But with the “necking” reference, Grandma was fine—which only proved my point about her being provocative.

On Sunday, Grandma Charlotte died.

Death hardly can be considered sudden when you’re talking about a 95-year-old. But it felt sudden. It was just Thursday that I learned she was unwell. Lizzie flew to Tucson on Friday to say goodbye for both of us. On Saturday morning—appros po of absolutely nothing—my son Ari said to me, “Grandma Suzy is really sad today, Mommy.” And I felt the connection of the four generations.

Grandma Charlotte lived a long life and a very big life, and she had her wits about her until the end. This is not a tragedy. But it is sad. The life of an incredible, pioneering woman—my grandma, my role model—is over. And I feel like another piece of my mom has disappeared too, though I believe that Mom and Gram are now together and I’m glad for that.

There is no funeral. Grandma didn’t want one. She hated a fuss. Once, Uncle Eddie had asked her how she wanted things handled after she died. She told him she wanted to be cremated and to have her ashes spread over a golf course.

“Do you want there to be an obituary in the newspaper?” Eddie asked her.

She paused before answering: “The newspaper should just say, ‘Charlotte Goldberg’s dead!’”

So.

This is not a newspaper. It’s just a blog and one that is not particularly widely read. But here it is:

Charlotte Goldberg’s dead!

Long live the broad.

Hi everyone. Welcome to my website! My memoir comes out in less than two months. As Penny Lane says in Almost Famous, “It’s all happening.”*

Like all the savviest members of the media, I am soliciting free content. For a video trailer that will be produced as part of the If You Knew Suzy promotional efforts, I am asking everyone (and anyone!) whose name is Suzy (or Susie, Susi, Susy, Sue, Suzanne, Suzanna, Susan, Suein … you see where I’m going with this) to make a 2-5 second video clip of themselves saying, “I’m Suzy” (or Sue, Suzanne, etc) and email the clip to IfYouKnewSuzy@gmail.com.**

To get an idea of what I’m looking for, I turn your attention to my lovely spokesmodel who—with the help of her spokesmen, because every spokesmodel needs at least a few—demonstrates how it is done.*** (Click this link: She’s Suzy)****

If you are on Twitter or Facebook, I would be so grateful if you would post a link to this entry as I’d love to cast a very wide net. This is going to very cool. I look forward to hearing from Suzys everywhere!

Best,

Katie

*I do hope it all turns out better for me than it did for Penny Lane.

**If you send me a clip, I will assume you are comfortable with my using it in my promotional video.

***It’s so easy, even a baby can do it!

****Anyone want to give me a Word Press lesson on how to embed video and/or change fonts and font sizes? Please email me!