Nonfiction by Michelle Ephraim, reviewed by Benjamin Selesnick
GREEN WORLD: A TRAGICOMIC MEMOIR OF LOVE AND SHAKESPEARE (University of Massachusetts Press)

The genre of second generation Holocaust survivor memoirs has grown vast with contributions ranging from graphic novels like Maus to theory laden analysis like Survivor Cafe. Michelle Ephraim’s Green World: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love and Shakespeare represents a great addition to the catalogue. Weaving together a dissection of her childhood with her parents who are both Holocaust survivors with the path she took through high school, college, and graduate school that led her to be a Shakespeare scholar, Ephraim shows how Shakespeare—and literature as a whole—can offer a salve from isolation and a sense of lostness.

For Ephraim, literature is many things. First, during her girlhood, it’s a “portal” offering the “constant possibility of fellowship” in what she finds in its characters. Later, when she discovers British literature, reading become “rebellious and freeing”—her mother had always spoken poorly of the British for how they treated her when she immigrated to Britain following the war, and so finding and enjoying British literature felt like a way for Ephraim to differentiate herself from her mom. Shakespeare, too, as the memoir progresses, takes on many meanings. For Ephraim, Shakespeare is at first incompressible, something that only “real” readers could understand; then, as she comes to better know his work and the universality of the themes he writes about, he becomes belonging, in that the community of Shakespeare readers—and not just scholars—is so wide, each of them with their own personal connection to his writing. “I didn’t know Shakespeare,” she writes, “but he knew people like me.” He’s a connective tissue that brings her closer to many people she meets, particularly when she gets hired on as a Shakespeare professor. Students and strangers alike take the opportunity to gush about their love of his work to her and they tell stories of how his work related to their own lived experience. 

Not only does Shakespeare speak to broader themes that Ephraim can relate to, Shakespeare knows Ephraim in how he depicts Shylock and his daughter, Jessica, in The Merchant Of Venice. Woven through the memoir is the ongoing connection between Ephraim and the Jewish man’s daughter. They each feel a tug and pull between their parents—or, in Jessica’s case, her father—and their connection to their Judaism. Jessica converts to Christianity in part to get away from her oppressive father; similarly, Ephraim works to distance herself from her parents. Quickly, Ephraim connects to Jessica’s plight: “My parents’ identities, like Shylock’s, were utterly defined by their terrible experience as Jews—by grief, paranoia, rejection. When I read the play, I was transported back to my childhood home as if returning to a crime scene.” Ephraim’s parents, because of their childhood, rejected their Judaism in many ways: they did not keep any Jewish traditions or observe any holidays, outside of those that included gift-giving. They held a grudge against American Jews who, during the war, were “looking out for number one” (i.e., themselves). It was an us-versus-them mentality. Even though Ephraim grew up in a town that had many Jews, she was isolated from them. To be Jewish was to be cursed, and it wasn’t until she met the man who would be her husband, who himself was an “American Jew”, that she came to see Judaism as a gift.

Intertwined with Ephraim’s understanding of her Jewish identity is her parents’ relationship to America. Her parents were both born in Germany—her mother went to Poland and then Britain to escape the war, and her father went to Manila and then the United States. Her father’s journey, though, more than her mother’s, is the one that dominates the book. Despite how the Germans treated her father, he was in love with the culture and the nation. He was stuck in Germany and Manila mentally. His experiences of the war continued to be a central force in his life: as an adult, he would give tours at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. and, in his later years, he compiled a collection of experiences of Jews in Manila during the war that eventually got published into a book. His obsession with this global tragedy became a defining feature of Ephraim’s childhood and, at times, impinged on her ability to strike out and forge her own identity in this country her father never felt was his own. Their relationship is a compelling dynamic to read about, and it’s revealing in how trauma can continue to take hold of the present, no matter how long ago it occurred.

One of the memoir’s greatest strengths is Ephraim’s voice. Through the sadness that’d dominated much of her early life, she’s able to create laugh-out-loud descriptions of the characters who peopled it. Further, she’s able to demonstrate a vulnerability, a desperate want, that is relatable and convincing. While in college, for example, she dates a man who was born wealthy, who’s family seemingly has no trauma or issues. He’s gregarious, loving, but ultimately, disloyal: he cheats on her consistently, and when he decides to end things with her to be with another woman, he asks Ephraim, “Can you be happy for me?” Ephraim’s feelings are an afterthought, and yet Ephraim continues to be enamored with him for her want to be “normal”, to be a part of a “normal” family. “Around Hank and his family,” she writes, “I was like a hungry child eyeing a room filled with every delicious morsel I’d ever imagined.” She wanted to be taken in, to be cared for. Through her earlier years, she was willing to put up with anything to get that precious feeling.

As someone without much experience reading Shakespeare, I worried, as Ephraim once did, that this book in its examination of Shakespeare’s work would be difficult to understand. But few words better describe this memoir more than accessible. Ephraim brings Shakespeare into the present and shows his continued relevance. Ephraim lacks confidence and, in her estimation, talent—in fact, she fails out of her Ph.D program at one point—which she later rediscovers in her ability to examine Shakespeare’s work. Both in her humble approach and  her welcoming and easy-to-understand way of viewing to Shakespeare, Ephraim draws the reader in. Shakespeare, she shows us, is not something to be feared. He is a joining force. He carries a piece of all of us.

Maybe this writer should give him another try. 

Benjamin Selesnick is a psychotherapist in New Jersey. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Barely South Review, Lunch Ticket, The Tel Aviv Review of Books, and other publications. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Rutgers University-Newark.