| Inventing Memory : A Novel of Mothers and Daughters is
the epic of a Jewish family in America, told through the stories of four generations of
women: from the turn of the last century to the early years of the twenty-first century. 
to read the Prologue, click here
click here for the Genealogy Page
The first unforgettable heroine is the matriarch, Sarah Solomon, born in the 1880's in
Russia, propelled out by a pogrom. She comes to America using her dead twin's precious
steamship ticket, arriving in America circa 1905--a world of bowler hats, elevated
railways, Irish cops, and labor ferment. From humble beginnings as a photo-retoucher,
Sarah establishes herself as a renowned portrait painter in New York. She lives in an
unorthodox menage-à-trois with two men--one a landsman
named Lev Levitsky, one a proper WASP named Sim Coppley and moves between an uptown
Edith Whartonesque world of New York society and a downtown Jewish world of anarchists and
artists.
Her daughter Salome, born in New York City circa 1912, carries the family's story
forward into the twenties, thirties and forties.
Salome Levitsky is a flapper, a child of the roaring twenties. Always the rebel, she
sails to Paris at seventeen. In Salome's journals and letters home, we meet everyone from
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to Picasso, Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton. We also learn of
her affair with Henry Miller and her daring first novel. Salome's life changes utterly
when in Paris she discovers one of her mother's best kept secrets about her past.
Salome's daughter, Sally turns out to be an extremely talented musician who becomes a
world-famous folksinger in her teens, but she is hardly the tough survivor her mother and
grandmother are. She is the weak link that demonstrates the strength of the rest of the
chain. Fame strikes her like lightning in the late sixties but with it come all the other
late-sixties plagues--addiction to dangerous drugs, hubris, grandiosity, the delusion of
being the epicenter of the universe.
We meet Sally through the narrative of her daughter, Sara, born in 1978, trained as an
historian, and in the process of researching family histories at the Council on Jewish
History in New York. She comes to understand the nature of memory, the way we all both
invent and assimilate our ancestors. In chronicling the women in her family, she also
remakes her own future.
Inventing Memory turns out to be Sara's story and the story of women in the
twentieth-century.
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Now available in paperback
(U.S. Edition)
Inventing Memory
A Novel of Mothers
and Daughters
HarperCollins
(U.S.A. & Canada)
July 1997
Of Blessed Memory
(U.K. Edition)
Italian Edition
Per i lettori italiani: visitate il sito di
Erica Jong in Italia
German Edition
Danish Edition
French Edition
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