Elisa Bernick Shares Family and Social History in 'Departure Stories'

Award-winning author and journalist, Elisa Bernick, joins us to discuss her engaging, new memoir, Departure Stories: Betty Crocker Made Matzoh Ball (and other lies). “So Departure Stories is part social history, part memoir, that uses my family’s story to explore both antisemitism and the struggle for women’s rights in Minnesota in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. This was a time of great upheaval in the United States and a time of upheaval here in the Midwest, and there’s a lot of hilarious stories, there’s a lot of heartbreaking stories in the book and what I do is trace the arrival of my family, their move out to the suburbs, very anti-Semitic suburbs of the Twin Cities, and then what happened when my family imploded and it looks at divorce culture and abuse… it also looks at empowering ourselves, using stories to change those traumatic experiences into something that actually lets you feel in control and powerful. It does lead to healing.”

Not only did Bernick face extreme antisemitism as a child, she also had a very difficult relationship with her mother. As she recalled, “The story, as it was told for many years, was that she was nasty, verbally and physically abusive, narcissistic and nobody that we wanted to have an ongoing relationship with because the truth was, she was all those things.” However, rather than focusing on her mother’s egregious behavior, she chose to put on her journalist hat and find out what caused her mother to be so unemotionally available to the point where she was incapable of nurturing herself or her children. “Once I understood that the story could be larger…[I] started to discover things like… Minneapolis was one of the most anti-Semitic cities in the entire country in the 1940’s. How could I not know that, right, as a Jew? What else was going on here that I didn’t know about and how did that affect my mom and my dad and Jews in general in the Twin Cities? So much anti-Semitism and how did this nexus of her being Jewish and female at a time when both Jews and women were not thought very highly of, well, what kind of an effect did this have on her? …it was obvious that her development as a person was intensely affected by both time and place.”

In addition to uncovering truths about her family’s history while writing Departure Stories, Bernick also discovered the impact of memory in storytelling. “Memory is fascinating…It’s actually the case that when I started researching memory, well we change memories, every time we dredge up a memory, we change that memory slightly and then it slips back into our brains and then the next time we bring it up, we change it again…nobody is remembering the original. It’s just, you’re remembering the memory.” Furthermore, she explains that the title, Departure Stories, comes from how we replay those memories. “Because we revise our life story constantly and we are given the opportunity to revise our memories, our stories, the way we, sort of, define who we are, essentially the moments in our lives that we choose to talk about and remember and to tell as stories are a departure from one moment to the next. Each of these is a departure story.”