Fic­tion

A Rea­son to See You Again

  • Review
By – September 23, 2024

A Rea­son to See You Again begins with a fam­i­ly Scrab­ble match in Chica­go in 1971. It is clear from the first sen­tence — Oh, the games fam­i­lies play with each oth­er” — that games will serve as a metaphor in Jami Attenberg’s affect­ing eighth novel.

Rudy Cohen, the charis­mat­ic and beloved father of the fam­i­ly, is a Holo­caust sur­vivor, sick­ly and weak­ened from his time in the camps, and a clos­et­ed gay man. His younger, Amer­i­can-born wife, Frie­da, has devot­ed her life to car­ing for him. Frie­da is a secret drinker, bit­ter about her fate, and increas­ing­ly cru­el to her two daugh­ters, Shelly and Nan­cy, who are teenagers at the start of the nov­el. After Rudy’s death, Nan­cy escapes into an ear­ly mar­riage and moth­er­hood, while Shel­ley grad­u­ates high school ear­ly and enrolls at Stanford.

Iron­i­cal­ly, giv­en her family’s dif­fi­cul­ty com­mu­ni­cat­ing and her own inabil­i­ty to con­nect with peo­ple, Shel­ley is one of the first employ­ees at a start­up that per­fects cell phone tech­nol­o­gy. (And, in a fur­ther twist, it is cell phones that dri­ve our soci­ety apart and spur an epi­dem­ic of lone­li­ness.) The pink phone on the cov­er of the book hangs off the hook, sug­gest­ing a missed or inter­rupt­ed con­nec­tion, with no human in sight.

The nov­el offers an unflinch­ing look at the poten­tial­ly destruc­tive con­se­quences of the care­giv­er role thrust on women. Frie­da, who cares for her hus­band as well as for the res­i­dents of the nurs­ing homes where she works, knows no oth­er way to express her love and retreats fur­ther into alco­holism, which affects the next gen­er­a­tion. Mean­while, the men are con­di­tioned to take what­ev­er they want — as evi­denced by Nancy’s husband’s ongo­ing affairs and hid­den fam­i­lies — and the women are left to pick up the pieces. Atten­berg skill­ful­ly relates the cor­ro­sive effect of famil­ial lies and secrets through­out sev­er­al decades. The book also touch­es on survivor’s guilt and assim­i­la­tion into non-Jew­ish culture.

No one comes out unscathed, and scarred char­ac­ters act out in unsur­pris­ing­ly dam­ag­ing ways. All of the women in the book (Shel­ley, Frie­da, Nan­cy, and Nancy’s daugh­ter Jess) man­age to hurt peo­ple they care about, both inside and out­side the fam­i­ly. Despite being a fem­i­nist icon, ear­ly tech guru Shel­ley looks the oth­er way as her male boss sex­u­al­ly harass­es a series of female hires.

Shel­ley, look­ing at a pic­ture of Muam­mar Gaddafi on the cov­er of Time mag­a­zine, thinks, You know who the real ter­ror­ists are? Your fam­i­ly.” At one point in the book, reflect­ing on a life­time of strife with­in her inner cir­cle, Shel­ley mus­es that the women of her fam­i­ly, despite their love for one anoth­er, are always just in the state of play­ing this game.” A Rea­son to See You Again hints that redemp­tion is pos­si­ble, how­ev­er. The book ends with Scrab­ble games between Frie­da and Shel­ley, who has cho­sen to take care of Frie­da at the end of her life. 

Lau­ren Gilbert is Direc­tor of Pub­lic Ser­vices at the Cen­ter for Jew­ish His­to­ry in New York City, where she man­ages the Lil­lian Gold­man Read­ing Room and Ack­man & Ziff Fam­i­ly Geneal­o­gy Insti­tute and arranges and mod­er­ates online book discussions.

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