Uprooted: Memoir

by Esti Skloot

Overview

When pregnant Esther—a young, adventurous, British-born Israeli—follows her new husband, Steve, to America, she has no idea what she’s getting herself into. Even before their baby is born, Esther discovers the dark side of her charming film production manager husband, and learns that she must cope with his moodiness and domineering personality. Left alone day after day in a high-rise apartment in Queens, Esther struggles with culture shock, homesickness, and adapting her husband’s whims—like the baby goat he brings home to their eighth-floor apartment to keep as a pet. Ten years and two more children later, thirty-four-year-old Steve is diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Despite aggressive treatments, he succumbs to the disease, leaving Esther to care for their three children alone, Esther at first feels lost and bewildered; as time goes on, however, she discovers that there is a freedom in her new situation—and that she has a greater inner strength than she ever before realized.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631526657
Publisher:	She Writes Press
Publication date:	08/20/2019
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Esti Skloot is an adjunct professor of Hebrew at the University of San Francisco. She was born in England to Jewish refugees who escaped Nazi Germany, and grew up in Israel where she received her teaching credentials from the Hebrew Teachers’ Seminary in Jerusalem. After serving in the IDF as a singer in an army entertainment troupe, she married an American and immigrated to New York and later California, where she received her BA in music at Sonoma State University and her MFA in creative writing at the University of San Francisco. Skloot loves nature, music—she is now learning to play the flute—and books. She lives in Mill Valley, California with Elan, her Israeli husband, and their pit bull, Laila. She has three children and four grandchildren, all of whom live in the Bay Area.

Editorial Reviews

"Uprooted is a wise, moving meditation on marriage, family, home, illness, endurance, and creativity. Esti Skloot explores in vivid scenes and poignant language the shifting perspectives we have across time, and the ways in which decisions we make and unforeseen events challenge and define us. This is a deeply felt, urgent memoir." —Floyd Skloot, author of In the Shadow of Memory "We find in Esti Skloot's Uprooted: A Memoir of a Marriage, a powerful meditation on the loss of love and trust in a marriage, the blessings that can flow from even the most painful of quandaries, and an unblinkered act of truth-telling—the fight to tell this truth astonishing us and bringing, one hopes, a measure of mercy to the artist." —Robert Roper, author of Nabokov in America "Esti Skloot has written a painfully honest account of her youthful marriage to a charismatic American she barely knows. As the couple shifts from New York to England to Israel and finally northern California, her husband’s erratic moods and domineering behavior undermine her confidence in herself and threaten to destroy her hopes for loving intimacy. When in his early thirties Steve is diagnosed with a brain tumor, Esti must face the likelihood that she will have to raise their three children alone. This coming-of-age story has truth, heart and soul." —Abby Wasserman, author of Mary Tuthill Lindheim: Art and Inspiration

From the Publisher

2021-04-07
Skloot recounts an emotionally turbulent marriage to her mercurial husband.

When the author met her future husband, Steve Skloot, in Haifa, she found his playfulness refreshing—he was “like a big kid in every way,” a welcome contrast to the sullen gravity she associated with the typical Israeli men she encountered. They didn’t have much time to get to know each other—he was visiting Israel from New York to volunteer at a kibbutz—but during that brief courtship, she became pregnant. Within six months, they were married and headed back to New York to start a life together, a frighteningly radical decision for the author. She missed her family and hated New York—it “was too much of everything: too much noise, crowds, eternal gray skies, and, more than anything, loneliness.” Also, she learned that Steve was maddeningly unpredictable, hardworking, and affectionate, but also angry and imperious. “Being married to Steve was riding a roller coaster, up, down, up, down—wonderful music at five o’clock then angry words at five thirty; champagne dinners giving way to lonely weeks; mutual showers one day and slammed doors the next.” Skloot poignantly limns the chaos of their marriage and her husband’s sometimes-bizarre eccentricity—he once brought a goat home to their New York City apartment, intending to make it their pet. She discusses her travails with admirable candor and ultimately furnishes an impressively balanced account of their marriage and three kids, affectingly painting Steve as a “crazy, wonderful, tormented soul.” Steve died young from a malignant brain tumor, and the author was heartbroken but exhilarated to once again have the freedom to govern her own life. Skloot’s writing style is companionably informal—her remembrance reads like a story conveyed from one old friend to another with great sensitivity and insight.

A moving recollection, thoughtful and bracingly honest.

Kirkus Reviews