The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father

by Mary Gordon (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1996

  $3.40

  Mary Gordon's father once told her, I love you more than God. They both wanted her to be a saint. This passionate man was Mary's first object of romance, the writer who made her certain to be a writer. He died when Mary was only seven. She worried over memories of her father in the years that followed like a tongue over a chipped tooth. Was he the dashing father in a hat and hard brown shoes striding down Fifth Avenue or the mishugah who couldn't keep a job? Mary Gordon took a perilous leap into the realm of memory to see what she could actually verify. As scholar detective, she sniffed through periodicals he had published in the 1920s and 30s - a children's magazine largely dedicated to her; the a girlie annual which incroporated increasingly distressing political opinions as the 40s approached. Here was a Lithuanian Jew turned right-wing anti-semitic Catholic, whose roots she had never explored. Mary, the scholar, critic and sleuth turned historian and archivist, as a completely unexpected past for her father began to emerge from official records. Mary Gordon is the author of Final Payments , The Company of Women , Men and Angels and The Other Side . She is also the author of the stories collections, Temporary Shelter and The Rest of Life .