Truth Comes in Blows

Solotaroff grew up in New Jersey, where his father worked hard at his glass company and dominated the family, including Solotaroff's less forceful mother. When Solotaroff was bar mitzvahed, his father demanded that he turn over the money he'd received as gifts to pay for the party. Later, when his mother was pregnant for the fourth time, his father demanded she have an abortion, and when she returned from the doctor, he reports, ""we could still smell the ether they had given her."" The eldest of three, Solotaroff was exposed to both his parents' arguments and their lovemaking (used condoms and later a diaphragm would be left on the toilet tank). In other hands, Solotaroff's father might have become a caricature, but there is a mature understanding here, so the image is, if occasionally unflattering, also nuanced and interesting. Topics are woven throughout, both unifying a potentially episodic book and making it more propulsive. For example, Solotaroff's Jewishness, while rarely addressed directly, pops up in items ranging from after-dinner discussions among his father and his friends of the German immigration quota to an interview for admission to Yale where he is told that no quotas exist, only to glimpse his high school principal's recommendation, which starts, ""Theodore is a hardworking student of Jewish extraction."" Although portions of this memoir have a familiar ring--being a Jewish kid in a gentile town, discovering the glamour of Manhattan--Solotaroff's unstinting honesty recasts even common events. (Oct.)