CROSSING REPLY

I was more than a little perturbed to see the orchestrated series of letters by Times “readers” from areas such as Oakland, San Francisco and Berkeley about my review of Bay Area writer Kim Chernin’s book, “Crossing the Border: An Erotic Journey.” The letters not only grossly misread my review but also presented argumenta ad femina , attacking both me and my own work.

Perhaps if these Bay Area readers had read my review more dispassionately instead of with the intent of coming to the aid of a friend whose book had not received an overwhelming accolade, they would have understood better what I was trying to say. Surely no objective reader could have called my review “vitriolic” or an “attack on (Chernin’s) life.” What I clearly meant to suggest in my opening paragraph, which refers to the possibility that Chernin “deserted her eight-year-old child,” was that was one construction that Chernin herself puts on her having left for Israel without the child. The next paragraph obviously points out that the book is about memory and our mature interpretation of the acts of our youth. It begins “Or did she (desert the child and commit all the other peccadilloes for which the mature Chernin often castigates herself in the book)? The review points up Chernin’s focus in the book on the cloudiness of memory, as the Times editor was astute enough to see in titling it “Clouded Hindsight.”

The points that Bader and Rogin make in their letters--about the memory’s construction of the past and about how people whom we guiltily and egocentrically fear we’ve mortally wounded in our youth may turn out to go and live full lives after all--are precisely the points I make in my review. Did they read the review--or did they read only Chernin’s request to them to come to her “defense”? But even more outrageous than the willfully gross misreadings of my review and by the letter writers is their attack on me and my own books. My very complex presentations of historical romantic friendships are reduced to statements by one Friend of Chernin that my writings “argue for the absence of women’s sexuality before the 20th Century” and that the notion of sexuality in women even in the 20th Century “also runs against (my) grain.” Anyone familiar with my work such as my history of lesbianism in 20th Century America, “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers,” would know how absurd that point is. But, alas, most of your readers will not be familiar with my work, and hence I am held up to ridicule by that correspondent, which seems to be given further justification by another Bay Area letter writer who accuses me of being “a representative of the sex police.”

My ability to write a review of a book such as Chernin’s is also called into question by one of the letter writers who accuses me of “personal antipathy.” So far from being prejudiced against the book at the outset, as the letter writer suggests, I desperately wanted to love it, having had my own experiences on an Israeli kibbutz decades ago, and I was so vastly disappointed that I did not love the book that I considered even declining to write the review.

I did write it, however, fulfilling what I believe to be the responsibility of a reviewer--not to rave indiscriminately about a book, but rather to tell the reader what it is about and to suggest why it does or doesn’t succeed. In my opinion, “Crossing the Border” failed not because it is an “immoral” book, as I am falsely accused of having written, but because it is often tedious--a much graver sin for a book than immorality.

LILLIAN FADERMAN, FRESNO