The Soup Has Many Eyes: From Shtetl to Chicago--A Memoir of One Family's Journey Through History Review

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The Soup Has Many Eyes: From Shtetl to Chicago--A Memoir of One Family's Journey Through History ReviewThis exquisite little book, The Soup Has Many Eyes, is a hybrid of history, mystery, proverb, and poetry. Most of all, it is a mother's memoir to her two sons, Josh and Jonny, as they embark upon their own journey in life - a journey that is both connected and disconnected with its heritage.
Perhaps a little too disconnected, or so the author, Joann Leonard, believes. In her narrative, Leonard attempts to fill in the spaces for her sons, to connect them to their past so that their present will have context. While much of the book narrates her family's struggles as they leave Russia amid the pogroms of the early 20th century to come to America, the "history" of the book serves as a backdrop for Leonard's musings about life and legacy. What do traditions mean? What do their voices say today? Can they serve her sons too, the children of a Jewish mother and a father who is the son of a Lutheran pastor? Leonard wonders (or laments?), "Did I tell them, did I tell them? Little things, forgotten. Big things, omitted. Things that, because I didn't know how to tell you, my hands and eyes tried to word." In The Soup Has Many Eyes, Leonard tells them.
And so much she tells them. Across time, Leonard spirits Gramma Chana back for an archetypical dialogue on her maternal doubts.
"`Gramma Chana, tell me,' I ask, `how do you know?'
`Know what, child?'
`What mothers are supposed to know?'
`Know? Achhh! What is there to know? You hoe your gratchkeh, the bread you knead until it feels just so, when comes the baby, you push. For this you need to know? Your heart, do you tell it to beat? Your breath, do you say "now in, now out"? So what's all this "know"?' . . . `Look at the men with their watery eyes, Joann. They squint at their books for so many years, they squint out all the color from their eyes. They clutch their foreheads with their hands ready to snatch the live thing inside that gnaws to get out. But always, there are more questions.'
`So what am I supposed to do, Gramma?'
`Do? Make the soup. That's what you do.'"
Ultimately, Joann's "answer" is that turgid alchemy of past and present that connects all the hope and fears of all generations going back to Eve.
"Josh and Jonny, do you ever remember us hugging you so hard and so long that you felt as if you couldn't breathe, as if it would never end? That's the hug of parents holding their child for all the parents in the world whose arms go empty. Parents whose children have been stolen from them by war, starvation, hatred, drugs, disease, despair. It is an embrace born out of guilt and gratitude that our child is here, though we are no more deserving. It is a fierce attempt to ring you with talisman and benediction."
Leonard's letter to her children is timeless because its taproot reaches down into the mystery of our dreams and memories. We live, love, work, and die to pass down our wisdom to our progeny. And why? Who can know? But The Soup Has Many Eyes describes the what and how if not the why and why not, and in Leonard's vivid images of her own history our collective consciousnesses meet.The Soup Has Many Eyes: From Shtetl to Chicago--A Memoir of One Family's Journey Through History Overview

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