"This anxiety of non-belonging."

As soon as I read the New York Times' book review of Susan Faludi's In the Darkroom, I knew I wanted to read it.  I immediately put it on hold at the library, and I went to pick it up the same day my hold came in.

I have struggled a lot with my reading this year.  But this book brought back so much of that enjoyment to me.  Every day after work last week, I would finish my dinner, pour myself a glass of wine, and then settle down on my sofa for some quality reading.

I set myself the task this summer of being more outgoing, of inviting a lot of different people to do a lot of things with me, and of trying to form true friendships with new people.  It has been a lot of work (and I wouldn't say it always feels particularly rewarding), but it's also been pretty fun and kept me extremely busy.  I have a feeling the people I have gotten to know over the past few months probably think that I am far more extroverted and social than I would probably ever describe myself as being.

For whatever reason, last week, I made no plans.  I had no plans for ten days in a row.  It was the perfect time to settle down with a good, meaningful, beautiful book.  And I'm so glad that In the Darkroom was there because it is one of the most moving books I have read in a very long time.

I almost hesitate to share a summary of the book because I think it will frighten some people away, and that would be sad.  At a high level, the book is about a grown woman coming to know her father after many years of estrangement, after he has undergone a sex change operation to become a woman.  She goes to meet her father in Budapest and the story unwinds from there, from his childhood growing up in a very wealthy Jewish family to the horrors of the Holocaust and the many re-inventions he underwent before this final one - choosing to live as a woman at the age of 76.

[Apologies if I am misusing pronouns here; Faludi refers to her father as "him" before the operation and as "her" after.  I will try to do the same.]

Faludi is a staunch feminist, and as she talks to her father and others who have undergone the male-to-female operation, she is struck by their adherence to traditional (stereotypical) gender norms.  Her father says troubling things like, "Now I can communicate better, because I'm a woman... It helps that I'm a woman.  Because women don't provoke."  She reads memoirs of women who talk about their experience, and none of them sound very feminist at all.  Take this quote from Jan Morris.  As Jim Morris, she had climbed Mt. Everest.  And yet, as a woman:

"I was even more emotional now.  I cried very easily, and was ludicrously susceptible to sadness or flattery.  Finding myself rather less interested in great affairs (which are placed in a new perspective, I do assure you, by a change of sex), I acquired a new concern for small ones.  My scale of vision seemed to contract... It is, I think, a simpler vision that I now possess.  Perhaps it is nearer a child's."

It's difficult not to be offended by the comments above.  And yet, most men who want to undergo sex change operations to become women have to pass a horrible test that dates from mid-century and very much requires them to conform to stereotype.  In order to be approved for the operation, they are expected to say that they don't mind putting their careers on hold or not being the bread winner, etc.  I had no idea this was the case.  The way that all of these memoirs are written with this assumption that women are inherently different than men in their approach to the world, and that feminists are stupid to want to change things because being a woman is just such grand fun, is very hard to take.  For Faludi, whose father fetishized womanhood prior to her operation with costumes and posed photos and then became much more conservation after her operation (this happens a lot, it seems), it must have have been overwhelming.

Faludi doesn't only tackle feminism, though.  She also talks a lot about Jewish identity.  Faludi is not very religious, but she doesn't have to be.  "I was someone with only the vaguest idea of what it meant to be a Jew who was nevertheless adamant that I was one."  Her father's relationship with religion was much more up and down.  Born to affluent but negligent parents who didn't even attend his bar mitzvah, Istvan Friedman shed his Jewish identity during World War II when Hungary became extremely anti-Semitic.  The many stories he recounts over the course of this book are amazing; he saved his parents' lives and the lives of many others, often by pretending to be a Nazi.  He escaped Hungry with friends on a fantastic lie.  He moved to Brazil, changed his name to Steven Faludi, and then moved to America, got married and had a family.  It was only when Susan said she was considering becoming a Christian that he informed her, quite violently, that she was Jewish.  "I remember exactly what I said.  That they exterminated the Jews.  And how could you do this?"

There are many stories like this in Hungary.  After World War II, there was Communism.  Many people hid their religion just to get by.  Only now are people (ironically, some of them ultra-right-wing politicians who denounce Jews) coming to know their family history and religion.  Faludi shares some of these stories in a beautiful chapter in which she attends Rosh Hashanah services and dinner with her father.  Temples that were built to hold hundreds now cater to groups of twenty or fifty.

In the Darkroom is one of the most moving books I have read in a long time.  The way Faludi weaves her own story with her father's and Hungary's, and that thorny issue of identity, is beautiful.

I studied my father's face, averted as it so often had been in life.  All the years she was alive, she'd sought to settle the question of who she was.  Jew or Christian?  Hungarian or American?  Woman or man?  So many oppositions.  But as I gazed upon her still body, I thought:  there is in the universe only one true divide, one real binary, life and death.  Either you are living or you are not.  Everything else is molten, malleable.