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Friday May 25, 2007

Author’s paean to his fiery mother is honest, magnificent

by jessie hawkins
correspondent

Clancy Sigal’s lengthy-titled “A Woman of Uncertain Character: The Amorous and Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted to Be a Respectable Jewish Mom) by Her Bastard Son” is an engaging, bare-all memoir of a man raised by union-leading communists. Living with his politically subversive Jewish mother, Sigal’s adolescence bears the dramatic flair of a proletariat neorealist coming-of-age movie.

His leading lady, described as having “flame-colored hair … [and] blue eyes steady as God’s,” is a powerhouse constructed of contradictions. Smart and proud, Jennie remains emotionally faithful to her runaround husband, despite her various affairs in his frequent absence; she preaches self-control at all times, but can’t help running after the bus that eventually drives her son away from her.

When he’s not dissecting his mother’s psyche, Sigal poignantly examines his faith. Sigal grew up in the Greater Vest Side, a predominately Jewish neighborhood in Chicago’s Lawndale section, with 65 synagogues in a square mile. He struggles to reconcile his working class, emotional, Jewish friends and family with the wealthy, unruffled WASPs he sees in the movies and is repeatedly roughed up by rabbis, shul teachers and little old men who find him less than observant.

Sigal writes, “There was no God. And I was angry with him … God the putz making my mother cry and ruining my dad’s bowels, and I was furious with him for creating, or condoning, a profit system that had no profit for us. God was a Jew who probably owned a bankrupt garment sweatshop and squeezed, squeezed the workers until their tears ran dry.” Tough stuff, but his rage has a way of, even in the past tense, keeping your attention.

Sigal unflinchingly recalls past pettiness, meanness, and immaturity, often directed at his own heroine. Battling the common cocktail of filial fondness, Oedipal lust and mind-bending anger toward Jennie, Clancy sulks and yells and wears silly clothing, like every pubescent who bears the slings and arrows of a mother who loves them a bit too much.

Still, it’s understandable that Jennie is so involved in Clancy’s life since it was he, and not her husband, who’s her (literal and figurative) partner in crime. Their exploits make for some of the snappiest chapters, and it’s hard not to grin widely as, flush with the heady fever of union camaraderie, they squirm out of the police’s grip.

A bit older, Clancy rumbles around the streets with a low-impact gang called the Rockets — friends with names like “Legs” and “Deaf Augie,” who love him but punish him for his successes. Like Jennie and not without his contradictions, he croons sappy love songs on one page, and beats the stuffing out of a friend on the next, becoming an American soldier, an ex-pat philosopher, and finally a Hollywood screenwriter and doting father.

In the end, however, Sigal is proudest of being his mother’s bastard son. “Ma,” he tells her when he’s a boy, “ … honest, double cross my heart and hope to die, it’s great to be illegitimate.”

Sigal’s memoir is engrossing and engaging, the better for his achieving solidarity with his Judaism, on his own terms. In the end, his confessional style and fearless memory are both stark and romantic, but never cloying — just like Jennie.

“A Woman of Uncertain Character: The Amorous and Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted to Be a Respectable Jewish Mom) by Her Bastard Son” by Clancy Sigal (288 pages, Carroll & Graf, $26).

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