My Mother and I by Elizabeth Gertrude Stern opens with a striking portrait of immigrant life, a memoir that captures one woman's coming-of-age between Old World tradition and American promise. Stern recalls arriving from Poland as a toddler and growing up in early 20th-century Pittsburgh under a father who expected a rabbi’s wife and a mother whose love was quiet, multilingual absence.
Blending intimate family scenes with sharp social observation, the memoir explores themes of assimilation, faith, gender roles, and the costs of upward mobility. Stern describes being schooled in Hebrew, forbidden from high school by paternal authority, and secretly drawn to secular books and education. Her mother’s endurance—bearing many pregnancies, never mastering English, and remaining emotionally close yet increasingly distant—becomes the heart of the narrative, illuminating the emotional price of cultural change for immigrant families and Jewish American communities.
Poignant and candid, this memoir offers a human, historically rooted look at the tensions between duty and self-determination. Ideal for readers of immigrant memoirs, Jewish American history, women’s studies, and anyone drawn to powerful mother-daughter stories set in early 20th-century America.
