The Force of Things: A Marriage in War and Peace

Digging up the ghosts and skeletons hiding in family closets can be exhilarating, repulsive, amusing, or terrifying, and reading memoirs of a family%E2%80%94unless it's ours%E2%80%94can be just as exhilarating or terrifying or uninteresting. What is it about this family that resembles our own? What lessons can we learn from this memoir? Stille's sometimes charming, sometimes tedious memoir traces the story of his star-crossed, storm-tossed parents who lived and loved against the backdrop of the migration of Jews from fascist-dominated Europe in the 1930s and 1940s and a cultural life in postwar America that included moving among New York intellectuals such as Dwight McDonald, Alfred Kazin, and Philip Roth. Some of his relatives are notable characters; his Aunt Lally, for example, is "something of a Holy Fool out of a Russian novel, a person almost free of guile or malice." An inveterate hoarder, Lally's apartment contains mountains of documents that eventually help Stille discover elements of his father's personality and his father's passion for detail. Like an improbable Romeo and Juliet, Stille's father, the celebrated Italian journalist Mikhail Kamenetzki, and his mother, the Midwestern beauty Elizabeth Bogert, meet when she "goes to a party in New York with her first husband and leaves it with her second" (Stille's father). Stille's often moving, though overlong, memoir records one couple's struggles and uncertainties in the midst of uncertain times. (Feb.)