Letty Cottin Pogrebin - Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy

Advance Praise for Shanda

In her revealing memoir, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, widely known for her intelligence, style, generosity, and boldness, admits the heavy burden of secrets including her own which she has long carried. Shanda, her clear-eyed look at one immigrant familys habit of secrecy and fear of shame reveals why a lifetime of trying to uncover hidden truths has informed her insightful books and articles on topics many are afraid to tackle.

Ruth J. Abram, historian and founding president, Lower East Side Tenement Museum

Secrets are costlyheavy weights to carry around. In Shanda, Letty Cottin Pogrebin takes aim at shame, the factory where the costliest secrets are made. She dismantles the machinery of shame, and she does it with stories that are vivid, emotional, and unforgettable.

Alan Alda, actor, author, director

The richness of Pogrebins stories, the complexity and beauty of her storytelling, and her devastatingly honest soul-baring make Shanda a powerfully stunning piece of life and art.

Mayim Bialik, actor, author, neuroscientist, co-host of Jeopardy!

Pride may be a deadly sin, but shame is simply deadly. With her trenchant wit and generous heart, Letty Cottin Pogrebin explores the theological and historical imperatives that drove her family to conceal pain and bury truths in service to misguided ideas of propriety and perfectionism. Shanda is a bracing book: both liberating and exhilarating.

Geraldine Brooks, journalist and Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist

With unflinching honesty, Pogrebin takes on the defining role of shame in her family, helps us name our own vulnerabilities, and reframes humiliation and secrecy into a powerful reckoning with our hidden truths and by extension, our humanity. Shanda is amazing, relatable, her bravest book yet.

Angela Buchdahl, senior rabbi, Central Synagogue (NYC), first Asian-American to be ordained a rabbi

Pogrebin has written much about family, politics, revolution, and evolution. Now she brings her fulsome attention to private and public shame, the personal secrets that are ever-haunting, and the national shame that causes brutal conflicts and global disasters. Shanda is a memoir about secrets that can paralyze us or, when released, help us fly.

Judy Collins, singer, author , activist

From its opening lines, Shanda captures our universal feelings about secrets and shame, and never lets us go. In this emotionally deep, often profoundly funny memoir, Letty Cottin Pogrebin confronts the darkness, shrinks it, and brings us out into the light. Her literary voice is one-in-a-million.

Tovah Feldshuh, Tony and Emmy-nominated actress, writer, and playwright

As Pogrebin reminds us, Jews remember and writers write, yet rarely has anyone brought such honest scrutiny to the question of what we reveal to others and what we keep hidden about ourselves. Shanda is a book about shame and secrets, it is about the lives and the lies of an immigrant Jewish family in a century where for Jews, hiding could be life-saving. But it is also about the process of discovering what had been kept hidden. The surprise is that in coming to know the secrets that others considered shameful, we not only become more compassionate and forgiving toward them but also come to know them more vividlynot for who they thought they had to be but for who they are. In the end then, Shanda is a meditation on love.

Carol Gilligan , author of In a Different Voice and co-author, most recently, of Why Does Patriarchy Persist?

Pogrebin divulges her own familys astonishing array of secrets and delves into the annals and anthropology of Judaism and feminism, fat shaming, sexual shaming, and more. Shanda is a book for anyone who has ever felt or feared shame, which is to say, this is a book for everyone.

Ellen Goodman, Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist, columnist, and author

This beautifully written memoir spoke volumes to me. As a proud feminist, Jew, and member of the LGBTQ+ community, I cant thank Letty Cottin Pogrebin enough for confronting her familys shandas with such brutal honesty and humor, and for unmasking shame-based fears that have destroyed innumerable lives for gen erations.

Judy Gold, Emmy Award-winning stand-up comic, actress, TV writer, an d producer

This is a memoir wonderfully grounded in the vibrancy of Jewish-American life, circa mid-20th-century. Its warmth and affection are co ntagious.

Vivian Gornick, literary critic, essayist, memoirist

Every writer knows that the best stories are those that cannot be written. But in Shanda , Letty Cottin Pogrebin breaks the rules and reveals some of the deepest secrets her family tried to keep hidden. The result is a beautiful meditation on the mysteries that families carry, and that, cumulatively, help shape a people.

Yossi Klein Halevi, senior fellow, Shalom Hartman Institute, author of the New York Times bestseller , Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

Pogrebin has written a brilliant, fun, wicked memoir that drills down into the pain of humiliation and fear of exposure in ways that readers of every age will recognize as true. Shanda is a brilliant memoir and a m ust-read.

Molly Jong-Fast, contributing writer, The Atlantic

With wit, erudition, and searing honesty, Shanda unfolds like a riveting mystery novelyou cant stop reading until the very end. A powerful subject, treated with sensitivity a nd grace.

Francine Klagsbrun, author of Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

Pogrebin tells personal stories that, despite their particularity, speak to everyones experience, and the wisdom she draws from Jewish teachings speaks to readers of any faith tradition or cultural heritage. Like all great memoirs, Shanda is an intimate reflection of the human i n us all.

David Kraemer, professor of Talmud and Rabbinics, library director, Jewish Theologica l Seminary

Letty Cottin Pogrebins work has changed lives everywhere. In Shanda , she does it again, giving us inspiration and strength to resist the chilling effects of shame and secrecy. This is a brave, beautiful book of r eckoning.

MK Merav Michaeli, Israeli government minister and member of parliament, leader of the Labor Party, and former journalist

The authenticity of Letty Cottin Pogrebins voice is what sets Shanda apart from a shelf full of memoirs. She is brave, she is brilliant, she is funny, and she is warm, but above all she is real, and because of that, her exploration of her own family history and her relationship to the universal feeling of shame and its particular applications to Jewish America hits deep. This is a remarkably memorable memoir because of the way Pogrebin tells her eminently relatable memoir. She is the mother you long to learn from, the friend you reach to confide in, the feminist writer who serves as a generational role model, the woman you just want to be close to.

Jodi Rudoren, editor in chief, The Forward ; former New York Times Jerusalem bu reau chief

You dont have to be Jewish to love Shanda . (I grew up a Congregationalist Christian.) You will marvel at Pogrebins always compassionate, often funny descriptions of the astounding family secrets kept by those nearest and dearest to her. (My language would not have been quite so wo nderful!)

Patricia Schroeder, former U.S. Congresswom an (Colo.)

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

ISBN: 978-1-6 3758-396-8

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-6 3758-397-5

Shanda:

A Memoir of Shame a nd Secrecy

2022 by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

All Right s Reserved

This is a work of nonfiction. All people, locations, events, and situations are portrayed to the best of the author s memory.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.