My Family: The Jewish Immigrants

In this collection, the veteran actor and playwright Norman Beim offers a series of memory plays that form a portrait gallery of his parents, aunts and uncles, sister, and cousins. The portraits are unsparingly honest in their kitchen-sink realism (reminiscent of the first-generation immigrants evoked in Ruth Gay's recent book, Unfinished People), yet they are more than sociological types; they are real, suffering people. I particularly liked the sturdy yet sensitive sister in Rose of Sharon and the misfit Uncle Jack in By the Rivers of Babylon. The final two plays in the book deal with memoirs of the Holocaust. While it's difficult to be sure, my sense is that these plays would work well on the stage. They also make absorbing, if somber, reading. Recommended for synagogues, academic, and public libraries.