Hortense Calisher

"A dazzling memoir by the nonagenarian novelist who discovers along the way a most damning document among her family's papers...a receipt for an 1856 life-insuurance policy, bought in Richmond, Virginia, by her grandfather for two of his 'servants' (i.e., slaves). The author, devastated by the discovery...ends this wonderful, lyrical account with a tattoo--a bugle summons, thrice uttered: 'Remember the slave.' What leads us to this tattoo is some of the most lovely language imaginable --Emersonian in its richness, Nabokovian in its evocativeness. . on nearly every page of this journey is a sentence you wish you'd written. . . A masterpiece of memoir."


"Calisher summons the darkest shades in search of the truths of 'intergenerational anecdote.' Like Emily Dickinson (whose cadences she echoes), when Calisher tells the truth, she tells it slant. . . Calisher offers just enough light for us to see through her words, darkly: 'It is a folklore style really, in which divagation, the power of the added subjective clause, if never quite innocent, has its place.' Calisher's folklore, like her heritage, is German, a Black Forest of dense American memories. But although her book is not easy to read, it is beautiful, shadowed and obstinately itself, telling stories of dead days in a language so drenched in 'before' that Calisher translates as she goes. Her collective family memory stretches across two full centuries, back to the beginning of the 19th. . .The emotional climax of the book is her intricate betrayal of a much-loved father, yet guilt haunts the entire two centuries her story spans, from black slavery to the Holocaust. This is belles-lettres as bete noire: its meaning sneaks up from behind and stuns you by degrees."


"Calisher's courage and high style would be a marvel at any age."


"Her new memoir is structured around three shoicking moments in which private life and public events collide. . .'Your grandmother never kept slaves' -- that's the opening line, and its very placement there suggests that it's going to be contradicted later on. . . Tattoo for a Slave offers more than enough reward as it lets family history illuminate (or throw shadows on) national history."