10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘My Childhood in Pieces' Review: A Life of Grins and Groans
Edward Hirsch, the celebrated poet, began life as Edward Rubenstein, the son of a mom named Irma and a dad who went by Ruby. But Ruby was a gambler and a gadabout, and Irma divorced him and married a man named Kurt Hirsch. When Eddie was 10, Irma wanted to change the boy's last name to the last name of his stepfather.
Ruby objected. A nasty little court battle ensued. Irma prevailed and the boy became Edward Hirsch—or so he and almost everyone else thought. But it turned out Irma didn't bother to file the legal papers to change her son's name until he was about to turn 21. He only found out decades later.
The deception was but one of many odd, occasionally funny and sometimes painful aspects of Mr. Hirsch's life growing up in a Chicago suburb, as recounted in 'My Childhood in Pieces.' The story unfolds in an almost pointillist style, in snippets of recollections, some only a sentence or two long. The result is a sprawling narrative peopled by an eccentric crew of relatives and friends and quickened with an array of setbacks, successes, disappointments and cruelties told with wit and a few regrets.
Mr. Hirsch subtitles his memoir 'A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy,' and he hits both notes. Skokie is a newish town some 15 miles north of downtown Chicago, populated in significant part by Jews, including, in Mr. Hirsch's youth, a fair number of Holocaust survivors.
