There are many memoirs about frightening, erratic parents. In these horrifying stories, the author’s most fragile years are marked by cruelty. She loses everything: her sense of safety, of normalcy, even the possibility of escaping into a better world. By contrast, the parent seems to emerge victorious, having destroyed the seeming threat to their toxic narcissism. These memoirs often end by settling scores, revealing who the true villains are.
There Was Night and There Was Morning is different in many ways. Sara Sherbill’s father, a pulpit rabbi, is far more enigmatic than the standard memoir-monster. While he terrorized his large family, including his wife, he was also a pillar, selflessly serving the lifelong needs of an adoring congregation. His Jekyll/Hyde duality puzzles the author as much as it tormented the rabbi himself, who rarely had a moment’s tranquility. In her early childhood, in Israel, Sherbill’s father was truly loving and devoted; indeed, the book’s cover shows a young man in a beautifully woven yarmulke, tenderly, almost reverently, embracing his infant daughter. Both this photo and the book’s title evoke the first, perfect days of biblical creation.
How does such a sweet man become so unhinged? And how does he continue to espouse Judaism, not as a hypocrite, but sincerely, devotedly, for years? Recounting her father’s funeral, Sherbill sums up his professional life:
He brought hundreds if not thousands of Jews back to Judaism. He taught them about God and about prayer. He officiated at weddings and bar mitzvahs and baby namings, blessing every person he encountered. He gave comfort to mourners. He sat with them and talked with them, and his words gave them solace.
Yet this great and giving man is also described as the author of domestic chaos. He beat his wife and five children in blind rages, and, later in life, he sexually abused young girls. The question of good and evil dominates the book. Is his “badness” in fact a form of mental illness? Rabbi Sherbill eventually lost his pulpit, struggled with addiction, and lived in solitary squalor. We are left to wonder whether he suffered a traumatic childhood, or whether he was simply stricken by an ungovernable, tragic, and untreated madness.
Even so, there is no erasing the ugly truths. After generously eulogizing her father’s many good deeds, Sherbill writes, “This is the canon of accepted stories, but then there are the other stories. The stories no one wants to tell.”
In this memoir, Sara Sherbill bravely tells the stories no one else wanted to tell. They hang in the air like wails of love-tinged grief, and it is up to us readers to make sense of them.
Sonia Taitz, a Ramaz, Yale Law, and Oxford graduate, is the author of five books, including the acclaimed “second generation” memoir, The Watchmaker’s Daughter, and the novel, Great with Child. Praised for her warmth and wit by Vanity Fair, The New York Times Book Review, People and The Chicago Tribune, she is currently working on a novel about the Zohar, the mystical source of Jewish transcendence.
