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Book Review
Fireweed: A Political Autobiography. By Gerda Lerner. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. xiv, 377 pp. $34.50, ISBN 1-56639-889-4.)
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Gerda Lerner begins and ends this extraordinary memoir with a description of the bright wildflower of her title, the weed that rises from burnt earth after a forest fire. Yet Fireweed is not directly about Lerner's pioneering career as a historian of women and gender; instead, the book ends in 1958, offering an account of "what went before" (p. 3): fascism and Nazism, World War II and the Cold War, American Communism and McCarthyism, immigration and labor, a troubled mother-daughter relationship, and a marriage based upon deep partnership. |
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Perhaps most of all, Fireweed is about the intertwining of memory and history, and as such it serves as a profound lesson in methodology. Memoirs are among the most consciously crafted of historical documents, but oral histories and courtroom testimony are also crafted narratives that rely upon memory, as are letters and even journal entries. Lerner's work is no ordinary reminiscence, for the act of remembering forms part of her story, as she continually reminds us how complicated are the primary sources upon which we rely. Ever vigilant in assessing her recollections, Lerner alerts us to the tricks of our historical informants, pointing out, for example, where her emotions take over or where the presentation of facts remains inadequate to convey an experience. "Telling all of this in retrospect, when the outcomes are known," she writes at one point, "distorts the actuality of the lived experience" (p. 249). The dead, she contends in the same vein, are "transformed because they live in the transformed memory of the living" (p. 2). |
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To corroborate or clarify, Lerner sometimes turns to history books, though more often to her own archives: letters from her mother and to her husband, leaflets, petitions, and meeting announcements, or at least those she had not burned in moments of fear. Thus does Lerner call attention to the fractional nature not only of memory but also of surviving primary sources, no matter how voluminous they might appear. In her case, she has at hand what was not "consigned to fire" or "left to rot in some moldy basement" (p. 1). |
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