If You Can’t Say Something Nice? : A QUESTION OF DESERTION

I am writing with reference to Lillian Faderman’s review of my book, “Crossing the Border” (Feb. 27). The review seriously misrepresents the story I have told in my book.

In 1971, as I clearly describe, I set out for Israel in order to start a new life, in a new place. Because I needed to find the place before I brought my daughter to it, I went to Israel alone, leaving her with her father. Throughout the book, as one of its principle themes, I describe my continued efforts to bring my daughter to the kibbutz where I was living. When this did not work out, for various reasons, I returned home to her.

Clearly, we recognize conditions under which a parent may leave a child without this act being considered desertion. A soldier sent off to fight a war, when he leaves his child behind, would not be considered to have deserted her. A husband and children leaving the mother behind in a particular city, while they moved across the country because of his work, would not have brought down upon the mother the charge of deserting her children.

Desertion is a serious charge to bring against a mother. Moreover, in Lillian Faderman’s review, this charge is not brought lightly, merely in passing, or as a mere rhetorical gesture. The reviewer takes it seriously enough to wonder if “we” can forgive the mother for deserting the eight-year old daughter. She wonders if the daughter can forgive the mother.

Nowhere in the book itself is the question of desertion raised or discussed. The charge is an invention of the reviewer. In “Crossing the Border” I raise questions about sex, passion, love, Judaism, by presenting an experience which was, for its time, fairly typical in its experimental nature. When Lillian Faderman overstates her case, she brings a judgmental, moralistic tone to the review, which misrepresents the book’s scope, humor and complexity. What a pity, since the book tells an honest story about a dramatic chapter in a woman’s life.

KIM CHERNIN, BERKELEY

I was appalled by the tone of the vitriolic attack in Lillian Faderman’s review of Kim Chernin’s “Crossing the Border” (Book Review, Feb. 27). Have Faderman and I read the same book?

Without paying much attention to the text, she seems to make an attack on the writer’s life.

“Crossing the Border” is a meditation on memory, time and change, and it presents, as many more traditional novels about the youthful artist do, the earthquake--and yes, dangerous--forces present in the young life of the creative self.

One cannot help but wonder if the same morally outraged reaction to a writer’s youthful marriage with the world occur if Chernin were a man. Would Faderman write then, with such indignation, that he had left his child--not “their child”--to be taken care of by his wife?

Human beings are filled with yearnings we hope to understand better as we grow older. It is disheartening to see that a woman author who treats honestly of her own desires: for erotic discovery, for spiritual enactment, for personal and political and communal relatedness: in short, for transformation of the self, is judged, not on the basis of the range of her intellectual and emotional grasp of the world, nor on the basis of her interesting investigation of the fictive qualities of memory itself, but instead by some sort of moral checklist developed from a misreading of the book.

TOBEY HILLER, OAKLAND

Lillian Faderman, highly respected for her academic work, made her name with writings that argue for the absence of sexuality in women’s relationships before the 20th-Century. Reading her review of “Crossing the Border,” by Kim Chernin, I came to wonder whether sexuality in women in the 20th Century also runs against her grain?

Her outright hostility toward Chernin’s “erotic journey” raises more questions about the reviewer than about the book. It also raises questions about the editor’s choice of Faderman as reviewer for such a sexually explicit and explosive book.

Faderman’s review is an odd blend of 20th-Century political correctness and 19th-Century puritanism. The reviewer makes a moral case against the person of Kim Chernin. This is odd, since Kim Chernin herself in “Crossing the Border” raises so many moral and psychological and philosophic issues related to sexual experience, identity, and responsibility. How is it possible for Faderman to have missed these? Does it have something to do with Faderman’s obsessive erasure of sexuality in women?

MARGE WILLIAMS, CAMARILLO

Your review by Lillian Faderman of Kim Chernin’s book is offensive to me and shouldn’t pass without comment.

Faderman clearly doesn’t like Chernin-the-narrator or the younger Chernin who is transformed in Israel. That’s OK. I guess it’s Faderman’s right. What is not right is to damn a book because of it. I, for instance, really loved the Kim Chernin character, despite her apparent self-centeredness. I found the particular ways she was troubled to be complex and sympathetic and her general sensibility and style to be quite endearing.

The issue here is that Faderman’s personal antipathy to the personalities in the book leaks out in almost every sentence and precludes even an attempt to address the book seriously.

The issue of whether one “discovers” or “constructs” one’s past in psychotherapy is actually a major controversy in the field today. Chernin attempts to illustrate and analyze the difficulties inherent in reconstruction in a unique and personal way, at times inviting the reader to engage, with her, in a psychoanalytic enterprise. What did Faderman think of the issues of memory and reconstruction with which Chernin is playing and is attempting to explore? We’ll never know, because Faderman is too cranky about Chernin’s alleged narcissism.

I suppose that someone like Chernin who has the courage to talk about her inner life in print shouldn’t be surprised when her readers respond personally. If the particular inner life that is conveyed is one that bugs you for some idiosyncratic reason, so be it. There’s no accounting for personal taste. However, to parade that cranky, idiosyncratic response as an analytical review in a major newspaper is just plain offensive. A reviewer ought to exercise more self-awareness and not take her own unanalyzed antipathy out on the author.

MICHAEL J. BADER, SAN FRANCISCO

Lillian Faderman, a representative of the sex police, wants to protect L.A. Times readers from pleasure and danger--erotic and bisexual desire, psychological breakdown and breakthrough, youthful transgression and mature recovery of memory.

Or perhaps what so disturbs her about Kim Chernin’s “Crossing the Border” is that the people on the kibbutz whose lives became intertwined were not, as Faderman falsely claims, destroyed by the experience.

Or maybe it’s what Faderman leaves out of her review in her effort at censorship, that a story of life-transforming seriousness can be rendered with irony and humor, and that what seems the most private love story in Palestine??? has political implications (about which she is silent but Chernin is not). If you disobey Faderman and read Chernin, you will have the major pleasure of “Crossing the Border,” and the added minor one of trying to figure out why the reviewer wanted to get in your way.

MICHAEL ROGIN,