Kim Chernin

Infobox Writer
name = Kim Chernin


imagesize = 200px
caption = Kim Chernin
pseudonym =
birthdate = Birth date and age|1940|5|7
birthplace = New York, New York, U.S.
deathdate =
deathplace =
occupation = Writer, Poet, Counselor
nationality = American
period =
genre = Fiction, non-fiction, poetry
subject = Feminism, Judaism, Mysticism, Psychoanalysis, Spirituality, Eating
movement =
influences =
influenced =


website = http://www.kimchernin.com

Kim Chernin (born May 7, 1940, Bronx, New York) is an American fiction and nonfiction writer, feminist, poet, and memoirist.

Biography

Kim Chernin was born on May 7, 1940, in the Bronx, New York. Her parents, Rose Chernin and Paul Kusnitz, were Russian-born Jewish immigrants who were committed Marxist and influential Communist Party organizers for much of their lives. Chernin's childhood was profoundly influenced by the death of her older sister, Nina, to Hodgkin's disease. Confronting death and resolving loss became a major theme in Chernin's later works.

Shortly after Nina's death, the Chernin family relocated to Los Angeles to be near relatives. Her mother resumed full-time work as an organizer for the Party and in 1951 made national headline news when she was arrested for "advocating the overthrow of the government." She was later called before the House Un-American Activities Committee for her work as a Party organizer and was the first person that the U.S. government tried to denaturalize and deprive of citizenship for such activities.

At the time, Chernin herself was active in the Party, organizing in Labor Youth League and, upon graduation from high school, traveling to Moscow for the Seventh World Youth Festival. In her highly acclaimed memoir, "In My Mother's House" Chernin writes:

Chernin moved to Berkeley to attend the University of California, Berkeley and married David Netboy at the age of 18. In 1963, her only child, Larissa, was born. While Berkeley was the epicenter for radical politics in the 1960s and 1970s, Chernin found herself drawn toward mysticism and poetry and the writer's life. She divorced a few years later and was married once more before settling into a long-term relationship with her current partner Renate Stendhal. She currently resides in Pt. Reyes, California, where she writes and works as a psychotherapist. She has published more than twenty books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

Writing

Kim Chernin's work spans a number of different genres: memoir, fiction, poetry, psychological study, and a psychosociological/religious study of women's search for self. In writing nonfiction, she moves between ideas and compelling narrative accounts, her own and her clients', weaving together intellectual discovery with personal stories. This form, a hallmark of Chernin's literary style, works as an extension of her feminist perspective that "the personal" carries political and cultural importance. Throughout her literary career, Chernin has drawn upon themes of the female psyche, mothers, daughters, The Great Mother, food, loss, memory, and storytelling. In recent works, she also explores her sexual relationships, both lesbian and heterosexual ("An American in Paris," Sex and Other Sacred Games, and Crossing the Border), characterizing women's sexuality as dynamic, potentially creative energy that, when accepted and freed, deepens personal and spiritual growth.

Chernin rose to national prominence with her trilogy of books about women and eating disorders, ', ', and "." One of the first women to the psychological and sociological roots of America's obsession with thinness, her work is considered seminal in feminist discourse around the body, eating, and the female psyche. Her work explores how eating has become a uniquely meaningful source of memory for women unconsciously seeking union with the original, mother-nourished, infant-self. In other words, food is a symbolic return to the powerful idealized mother of early childhood, the model of femininity from whom children hope to draw their own potential.

The impact of her sister Nina's death, and other significant losses suffered by her extended family, have prompted Chernin to write analytically and imaginatively about women's experience with different kinds of emptiness. In her studies of women's identity and body image, Chernin explores their psychological responses to physical hunger and cravings, connecting that hunger to women's emotional and spiritual emptiness, unnourished by patriarchal traditions. She contends that understanding women's hunger—accepting it as a natural, healthy appetite for more than the scanty life portion women have been fed—can lead to discovery and satisfaction with the forbidden fruit of female knowledge and power. Women lovingly preparing food for (or experiencing interpersonal intensity as they eat with) other women recurs as a motif in several books and recurs imagistically in her poetry.

Reflecting her family's storytelling tradition, Chernin often uses a narrative structure that centralizes one tale and casts it within an interlocking web of other women's stories, often spinning her own story into the web. "In My Mother's House" . In Crossing the Border, the narrator becomes split in two, and the present-day Kim Chernin takes over the narrative from her thirty-year-old self, the subject of the central plot/story. Through her memoirs, fiction, and the article appearing in Tikkun, Chernin reminds us that any story--family, biblical, and newspaper--is subject to multiple interpretations through the teller and the telling. Personal and cultural memories, inevitably subjective, reveal a great deal about the tellers. Through memories and what others learn from them, meanings and images reshape the future.

In The Flame Bearers, Chernin shows the value of memory to retrieve the spiritual vision of the past. Challenging women's exclusion in traditional Judaism, Chernin creates the Flame Bearers, a sect of women who are Jewish, yet not traditional observers; when these women read the Holy Book, they reconstruct Old Testament stories to reassert the days before women were excluded from Orthodoxy. Retelling and recording their stories is how the Flame Bearers' traditions survive. In the novel, to hear the Flame Bearers' woman-centered stories is to take responsibility for remembering them. To remember them is to prepare for retelling them to the next generation of women. Through the memory of Chochma, the Great Mother, the story of female power and knowledge lives on.

This symbolic carrying-on of stories and traditions through women in the family becomes another central theme in Kim Chernin's work. The Flame Bearers centers on Israel (Rae) Shadmi's gradual acceptance of herself as the sect's next leader. First, she resists this role; slowly she grows into the knowledge that her grandmother's ancient stories have all become "entangled around her very core" ("In the House of the Flame Bearers" 58). Similarly, In My Mother's House displays the mother-to-daughter bonding between generations of Chernin women, bonding effected through Rose's telling of tales and through daughter Kim's ability to set them down.

At the same time that Chernin emphasizes the passing of traditions, especially from mother to daughter, she is also concerned with the daughter's desire and need to be unlike her mother. Of In My Mother's House, Chernin says: "Writing that book I was . . . preoccupied with the struggle to be different from my mother" (In the House of the Flame Bearers," 56). In fiction, she explores powerful spiritual traditions of her grandmother, matriarch of the Flame Bearers. Psychologically, Chernin examines mother-daughter opposition and attachment in The Obsession, The Hungry Self, and Reinventing Eve.

With her latest memoir, Chernin continues to create narrative form that is provocative, sexually charged, and highly experimental. As a storyteller and a psychologist, Kim Chernin's re-visioning of feminine consciousness expresses women's hunger for personal, sacred truths about their maternal and erotic powers.

Survey Of Criticism

In light of the multidisciplinary content of her work, it is not surprising that no scholar has yet presented an overview of Kim Chernin's writing. However, Chernin's books have been widely reviewed: Responses most often focus on her experiments with narrative form and her feminist interpretations.

Esther Broner is one who admires Chernin's innovations in form. In My Mother's House, Chernin's most reviewed and highly acclaimed book to date, Broner describes as having a "Chaucerian" structure, with its many tales-within-a-tale format. Chernin's narrative structure results, she says, in the readers' experience of intimacy with the characters, as we find ourselves "listening in" on Rose and Kim's private conversations. Similarly, critic Diane McWhorter hails In My Mother's House as "ingeniously" structured and "operatic" in construction. Yet McWhorter also expresses frustration with the story's irregularities in chronology and historical context. She contends that the book lacks sufficient social and historical context, suggesting that Chernin avoids the larger world by using narrative ellipses. The effect, according to McWhorter, is to recreate "the claustrophobic environment of her mother's Russian shtetl."

Similarly narrated in the fluid shape of a tale within a tale, Chernin's psychological studies have enormous appeal for their accessibility. Most reviewers commend Chernin's ability to make complex thought both readable and intriguing. This achievement, says Susan Wooley, lies partly within Chernin's literary talent for writing with a "liquid" style. Reviewing The Hungry Self, Wooley applauds Chernin's ability to create a "stunning word-portrait of women"; at the same time, she concludes that Chernin's impressive writing talents seem to "plug gaps in research," leaving some serious theoretical questions unresolved or undisputed. Anne Llewellyn Barstow, reviewing Reinventing Eve, agrees that "Chernin's gifts are poetic and visionary . . ."; after enthusiastically offering this book's praise, Barstow adds that at times the "experimental material and the religious re-visioning do not come together."

What such comments suggest is that reviewing scholars who value her work sometimes take Chernin to task for not going far enough, wishing she could have applied her keen powers of insight to more expansive conclusions, or could have incorporated feminist research into her books of analysis and personal thought about women's experiences.

Chernin wrote what is perhaps her most unconventional book to date, Sex and Other Sacred Games, with Renate Stendhal. In this fictional exchange of letters, and American femme fatale and a European lesbian meet and then write to discuss sexual "truths" concerning passion, attraction, pleasure, honesty, risk-taking, and power. Shana Penn in The Women's Review of Books, values the rhetorical substance of the dialogue in which Claire and Alma thoroughly explore the reaches of their respective sexual identities and growing intimacy. A review in Publisher's Weekly, on the other hand, questions the book's sexual and political assumptions. This novel of heady conversation drew either unmitigated criticism or solid respect, depending on the reviewer's interest in abstract, lengthy, feminist discussion of sexual politics and tolerance for an epistolary structure with only minimal suggestions of plot.

The Flame Bearers, Chernin's only work of pure fantasy to date, deserves special mention. Reviewed as a novel to be "read with delight by those who enjoy good ideological revenge," Anne Roiphe describes The Flame Bearers as Jewish, feminist science fiction, celebrating its imaginative, mythical, woman-centered rendering of Hebraic tradition and God-wrestling. While admiring the book's "richness of traditional knowledge that shines on every page," Roiphe wishes that Chernin had resolved women's historical exclusion from Judaism by creating more than "a turning of the tables." That disappointment notwithstanding, Roiphe abundantly praises the book's power and vision, hailing Chernin's playfulness in using kabbalistic imagery and folklore to display the possible incompatibility of modern feminism and mainstream Jewish observance.

Overall, Kim Chernin's work reveals her commitment to understanding women's inner lives and her fascination in exposing memory's truthful fictions, with both personal and political life-story significance. Chernin's latest memoir, Crossing the Border, has not been reviewed to date. In it she extends her penchant for crossing boundaries of narrative convention and continues to blend the "surprise and suspense . . . depth and humor" that Roiphe found in The Flame Bearers. Chernin intends to write a sequel to Crossing the Border.

Chernin on herself

"Here I am, almost 65 years old, with 150 words to describe my life! That’s less than three words per year. Clearly, there is a need for consolidation. But consolidation according to what principle? What really matters about my life? What counts professionally, personally, intimately, collectively? What do I want to set down in this brief space? After a moment’s thought, I know: I come from a Russian-Jewish, Marxist family that had set aside its practice of Judaism. I didn’t even realize until long after he was dead that my father, who was born to an Orthodox family, had been a bar mitzvah and as an adult still read Hebrew. I have had to discover Judaism on my own, educate myself, and learn what it means to be a Jewish woman who worships "Shekhinah" (the feminine presence of God). I am proud of this accomplishment. I am a Jewish writer. What more is there to say?"

References

*"This article incorporates text from [http://kimchernin.com/bio.html] released under the GFDL license"
* [http://www.jwa.org/feminism/?id=JWA011 Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution] from the [http://www.jwa.org Jewish Women's Archive]
* [http://www.kimchernin.com Kim Chernin's personal website]
*Chernin, Kim. "The Flame Bearers: A Novel". New York: Random House, 1986.
*Chernin, Kim. "The Hungry Self: Women, Eating, and Identity". New York, NY: Times Books, 1985.
*Chernin, Kim. "In My Father's Garden: A Daughter's Search For a Spiritual Life". Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1996.
*Chernin, Kim. "In My Mother's House". New Haven: Ticknor & Fields, 1983.
*Chernin, Kim. "The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness". New York: Harper & Row, 1981.
*Chernin, Kim. "Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search of Herself". New York: Times Books, 1987.
*Chernin, Kim. "The Woman Who Gave Birth To Her Mother: Seven Stages of Change in Women's Lives". New York: Viking, 1998.
* [http://www.radcliffe.edu/schles/ Schlesinger Library] , Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge, MA.