The ineffable functioning of memory and the brain itself is integral to Bartók’s complex story. She brilliantly teases out the emotional and physical fallout of her mother’s brain, damaged by illness. Within the memoir is also an autobiography of her own brain, traumatized in childhood and then injured in a car accident a decade ago. Cognitive function or lack thereof in her life is represented by “a palimpsest — a piece of parchment from which someone had rubbed off the words, leaving only a ghost image behind.’’
Bartók’s childhood is a continuous maelstrom powered by Norma’s violent rages and hallucinations. The will to survive the storm leads to the desperate moment when Bartók and her sister legally change their names as young adults so that their mother cannot track them down. Thus begins 17 years of homelessness for Norma and 17 years of wandering for Mira Bartók, who was born Myra Herr.
The Herr sisters’ name change is the foundation of the memoir — an action and reaction that calls to mind the Jewish superstition of changing a dying person’s name to hide her from the angel of death. For that was what Norma Herr was for her daughters — messenger of death who in one of their last encounters in 1990 chased Bartók with the jagged end of a bottle as her nearly hysterical sister Natalia, formerly Rachel, called the police for help.
Over the years Bartók lived in Italy, Israel, and Norway. Along the way she penned a series of children’s books on ancient and living cultures. She became an accomplished artist who taught herself the art of illumination. She remembers being transfixed by Queen Isabella’s Book of Hours — a devotional on display at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She also remembers wandering among ancient art, searching for the mother who forgot to come back for her.
