Laura Esther Wolfson

My initial gut reaction to reading FOR SINGLE MOTHERS WORKING AS TRAIN CONDUCTORS: "Wow! I mean Bravo! I mean, Holy s**t but this is an impressive achievement. It's like a life - a whole life, and a very eventful one at that, with its serial ups and downs - successfully compressed into less than 200 pages." In fact I wrote to the author, Laura Esther Wolfson, and told her exactly that. I also told her that I love her sense of humor and her unique way with words, and to "Know this: You are a WRITER!"

Because this is Wolfson's first book, and obviously she has been storing up her stories, experiences, feelings, failures and successes, joy, sorrow, grief - all of it - for close to thirty years, and now here they all are spilled artfully out onto the pages of this heartfelt, moving, funny and heartbreakingly lovely book. FOR SINGLE MOTHERS is presented as a collection of essays, many of which have been previously published in various magazines and periodicals, but taken all together they form a memoir - a life - and I for one LOVED it.

I'm not really surprised at Wolfson's way with words, her facility for expressing herself, because she has been a student of languages since her teenage years. In high school she read ANNA KARENINA and decided she wanted to read it in its original Russian, which she began to study in her college years at Cornell, back in the early 80s. She has been studying, learning, speaking and living that language ever since. Besides the usual classroom and immersion methods of learning, Wolfson also employed what is probably the most effective way of all for learning Russian - "the husband method."

Yes, and we learn this on page one of the title essay, in which she tells of her travels in the USSR toward the end of the Cold war -

"In the Soviet hinterlands I met a woman I'll call Nadezhda. She treated me like a daughter. She had none of her own. She clearly wished she did. Reader, I married her son."

And with that simple opening, I was hooked. I had to know the rest of this woman's story. And what a story it is - of a sheltered childhood in Upstate New York, squelched dreams of being a ballerina, and then writing dance troupe critique columns for the local newspaper, travels to London, Paris and Lithuania. That first failed marriage - in Tbilisi and Philadelphia - to a Russian who couldn't commit to fatherhood. A second marriage in New York City, didn't last either. During that first liaison, Wolfson learned some bitter truths of Russian life - of women eager for any kind of birth control, even a second hand diaphragm; of another woman, a teacher "married to a man who didn't like condoms," who'd had THIRTY abortions. "That was enough unborn children, she noted sadly, to fill every seat in her classroom."

After the second divorce, frustrated and sad, Wolfson wonders if "it's'time to hop off the treadmill for good." And further notes, "I have nothing against marriage. It's husbands I find problematic." She goes on to tell of other marriages within her extended family, both failed and lasting, and how she learned, much to her surprise, at age eleven, that her father had even been married once before he met her mother.

But there is just so MUCH encompassed in Wolfson's slim volume of memories. Her inquiries into her Jewish heritage, which took her to Lithuania for intense studies in Yiddish. Her continuing struggles with a rare degenerative lung disease which often leaves her breathless, making her work as an interpreter increasingly difficult. Her near miss at translating the work of Nobel winner, Svetlana Alexievich, who she did know and work with. Her sojourn in Paris to immerse herself in the French language, making her more marketable as a linguist. Reading Proust on the subway. All of these travels and studies finally land her a good job as a translator at that great "green glass tower" in midtown Manhattan.

In the interest of full disclosure, I worked as a Russian linguist for twenty-five years. So reading these stories by a woman who has, admittedly, "been a Russianist practically forever," has been a pure pleasure. Wolfson displays a disarmingly delightful sense of self-deprecating humor throughout her narrative. She knows enough not to take herself too seriously. And I love her for that. But make no mistake. This is a woman who has thought long and hard about her half century or so in this vale of tears. This is her story, and, as a confirmed lover of good books, I am so pleased - and grateful - that she has finally gathered it all and gotten it down and shared it with us. Thank you, Laura. Bravo! My highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (més)