What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World: A Memoir by Dorothy Lazard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
from “Healing Self, Others, the World,” Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, 24 August, 2023
Dorothy Lazard’s What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World: A Memoir, from Heyday Press, Berkeley, tells a “Negro” St. Louis girl’s journey to life in San Francisco and Oakland during the 1960s and 70s where she astutely puzzled her way through many aspects of the laundry list of cultural woes
(racism, childhood and adult trauma, sexism, gender bias, climate disaster, police militarism, domestic abuse, physical and mental illness, poverty, immigrant and native genocides, legal and political corruption)
afflicting humans then and now. She survived.
These challenges in her family and world, however, come to us through the eyes and heart of a defiantly authentic, sharply intelligent and sensitively perceptive little girl becoming a young woman, and her family who did their best to make her “stay out of grown folks’ business.”
But she was CURIOUS, SMART and BRAVE.
She had a stint in an all-white Catholic Orphanage, reuniting with her extended family, discovering the Public Library, the power of the written word and fueling her persistent curiosity as she traversed different Black/white strict/loose neighborhoods and school systems that taught her far more than the Three Rs.
Maybe Resilience, Racial/familial Realities and Resourcing Refuges from loneliness, poverty, violence and prejudice. And Risking the courage and self-esteem to keep on seeking them.
Uncle Shirley, MaDear, Mr. Bear, Aunt Ri, Sarah, Mam’Ella are all there in full, human complexity. A theater of mixed curious, inspiring, loyal, earthy as well as sometimes absent, negligent, creepy and awful caregivers; “the wrong crowd,” teachers, friends and mentors open up in love, joy, pain and all-too-human frailties. She describes them all with clear-eyed honesty and wise consideration of the flaws, world and society she and they were born into and lived in together.
Among the “many layers of peace…hippies…church folk…antiwar protestors…Violence seemed to creep into all corners of life during my fifth-grade year…” “student protests, race riots…Paris…Prague…Olympic victory stands.”
“It seemed everybody was warring for control of somebody or something – a country’s resources, a government, a classroom, or a curfew… tangible things like land, and intangible things like honor and decency.”
Well done, well done! She survived. And made HER OWN world, too.
https://www.heydaybooks.com/authors/d...
Heyday site – “A librarian for forty years, she joined the staff of the Oakland Public Library in 2000. From 2009 until her retirement in 2021, she was the head librarian of OPL’s Oakland History Center, where she encouraged people of all ages and backgrounds to explore local history.”
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment