Memoirs

These lives may be radically different, but their lessons are all too human.

THE DREAM By Harry Bernstein | Ballantine. 260 pp. $24

Harry Bernstein's first critical success came with his memoir The Invisible Wall, published two years ago when he was 96. It described his upbringing in an impoverished Lancashire town, where the Jews lived on one side of the street and the Christians on the other. Though he'd been a writer all his life, Bernstein had never had much success, despite early encouragement from legendary critic Clifton Fadiman. This new memoir continues his story.

The dream of the title was that of Bernstein's mother, who had been abandoned by her family in Poland and essentially tricked into marrying his brutal father at the age of 16. She struggled to support the family on the pittance she got from her husband's weekly paycheck before he drank away the rest, and she longed for security and comfort. When steamship tickets to America arrived, sent by an unknown donor, it seemed her dream was about to be realized.

The family eventually achieved a measure of stability in America, only to find their lives upended by the Depression. Bernstein describes their struggles and his mother's perseverance without a trace of self-dramatization or self-pity, in quiet prose that sometimes touches poetry. You are present when Aunt Lily weds her rich, adoring Phil, and you observe the distress of Phil's parents at the noisy, drunken chaos kicked up by the Bernstein family. The most interesting and enigmatic figure in the book is the grandfather who once made a living as a roofer but, after a fall, was reduced to begging on the streets of New York. For years he quietly supported his family, which did its best to ignore his existence.

Beneath the poignant descriptions of places and times past, beneath the rising and falling patterns of these characters' lives, we hear what Wordsworth called "the still sad music of humanity."

A BROOM OF ONE'S OWN Words on Writing, Housecleaning & Life By Nancy Peacock | Harper Perennial. 169 pp. Paperback, $13.95

One of the most appealing things about A Broom of One's Own is the author's voice: credible, humorous, self-deprecating, the voice of a friend you'd like to linger with over coffee. Although Nancy Peacock is the author of two well-reviewed novels, when she wrote this memoir, she was cleaning houses for a living. Sometimes this makes her sound wistful or angry, but never whiny, though there is one notable moment when she's scrubbing the toilet of an old boyfriend and he comes in to tell her about a cousin who's just landed a $2-million book contract. A furious struggle with her inner demons ensues.

The text combines observations on housecleaning with thoughts on being a writer. For many readers, Peacock's musings on the writing process will be the most interesting part of the book, but her observations on her clients are in some ways even more compelling. Peacock has learned to understand people's psyches through the mundane details of their homes -- the places maintained primarily for show, with all that's fading and imperfect hidden from view; the clutter that reveals unquiet minds; the houses that hum along cheerfully, with everything in tune. There are details about the stresses of the job that might make anyone who hires a maid uneasy. Barbara Ehrenreich covered some of the same territory in Nickel & Dimed, but Ehrenreich's tone was more acid, and her class consciousness was at the fore. It's not that Peacock hasn't thought about class, it's just that her temperament is more forgiving.

The only complaint one can make about this slim, thoughtful, entertaining book is that it's over far too soon.

APPLES & ORANGES My Brother and Me, Lost and Found By Marie Brenner | Farrar Straus Giroux. 268 pp. $24

Marie Brenner, a New York-based reporter, had been semi-estranged from her eccentric brother, Carl, for years when he wrote her a letter: He had adenocarcinoma, was dying, and needed her help. Once an attorney, Carl was now an apple grower in Washington State. Brenner put her life on hold and flew out to be with him. It was a move fraught with ambivalence.

Carl had welcomed his baby sister into the world by dumping her out of a window. In his early teens, he had joined the John Birch Society. During the Vietnam War, he wanted to bomb the commies into oblivion; after Sept. 11, he voiced the same sentiments toward Arabs. A private, irascible man, endlessly critical of his sibling, Carl had a passion for Wagner that matched his love of apples. Brenner describes his obsessiveness about every piece of fruit shipped from his warehouse, his rage at seeing a single blemish or mark made by a picker's fingernail. Attempting to understand his vocation, she explores apple country and delivers poetic descriptions of orchards in bloom, sympathetic portraits of orchardists, and a charming scene set in an old-fashioned pie shop. She also notes the decline of the apple industry under the pressure of cheap Chinese imports.

Brenner's sentences often have a lively lilt, and she raises interesting topics, but she appears to have almost no interest in sequence or narrative. She quotes the Wikipedia definition of sfumato, "a painting technique which overlays translucent layers of color to create perceptions of depth, volume and form," and seems to be attempting a similar technique. The text jumps from scene to scene, and many passages feel like undeveloped writers' exercises. Because she never really penetrated Carl's carapace, Brenner's memoir doesn't explain her odd, complex brother.

WELCOME TO SHIRLEY A Memoir From an Atomic Town By Kelly McMasters | Perseus. 309 pp. $24.95

Many of us remember newspaper headlines from a decade or more ago about Long Island cancer clusters, possibly connected with environmental contaminants. Kelly McMasters grew up in the working-class Long Island town of Shirley. "Living in Shirley said something about you," she writes. "We glowed in the dark from the nuclear experiments at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Our hair was teased higher and we had to put clothes on layaway, even at Fashion Bug. We bought three-day-old bread and cakes at the Entenmann's outlet. We talked louder and had bad grammar, said undaweaya instead of underwear."

The paradox was that McMasters, who landed in Shirley with her impecunious parents as a child, loved the place. Some of her best passages describe the way local families supported each other; her morning wanderings into whichever house she had chosen to visit for breakfast; the town's magical 4th of July celebration; and her strong, kindly neighbor Jerry, who worked at Brookhaven and wouldn't allow any of the children to touch him after work until he had washed up. The young Kelly saw Jerry as invincible, even when he began falling down from tumors that had invaded his brain. Jerry's was the first of many cancer deaths in Shirley.

For much of the book, the interweaving of autobiography and fact works beautifully. But eventually the pages are taken over more and more by journalistic minutiae, and the memoir begins to feel less alive and more like a didactic and drawn-out investigative piece.

PLEASE EXCUSE MY DAUGHTER By Julie Klam | Riverhead. 261 pp. $22.95

This book begins promisingly as Julie Klam introduces first her inspirational grandfather and then her mother -- a smart, intensely materialistic woman who never had to work and who wields an amusingly venomous tongue. In the car with 5-year-old Julie, she offers a running commentary on the women they see in the street: "What was she thinking this morning? 'I think I'll wear everything brown that I own'? Brown ain't going to cover that ass, honey. You need a tarp."

Klam herself is pretty spoiled, she tells us, but we like her anyway because she's also neurotic and funny and rueful. We sympathize when she loses jobs because of her incompetence and laziness. We all know people like this; some of us have been such people. And there's a hilarious sequence about her scary mafioso boyfriend and the Rosh Hashanah dinner he attends with her at her aunt's house. So we read along confidently, waiting for Klam to acquire a salutary dose of reality, a sense of how other people struggle. But that epiphany never really comes. There are setbacks -- a husband's illness, the loss of a beloved mother-in-law, a touch of financial insecurity and Klam's eventual realization that she'll have to work for money. But eventually all is resolved, and, thanks to a network of contacts, Klam is profitably freelancing. Even her snippy mother turns out to be nice -- or at least nice to Julie. You've been set up for satire, but you end up with Oprah. ·

Juliet Wittman is the author of "Breast Cancer Journal: A Century of Petals."