More than twenty years ago, Anita Lobel published her childhood memoir, NO PRETTY PICTURES, to much acclaim. A child's tale of surviving Hitler's Poland, a rescue by the Swedish Red Cross in 1945, and ending with school years in Stockholm, that book was written in a young girl's voice. NO PRETTY PICTURES was nominated for the National Book Award, received gratifying reviews, and sold extremely well. Now, these many years later, she has decided to tell the rest of her story.
STONE SOUP is an adult memento which begins in the early 1950s with an unwanted transplantation to New York City, then grows into a new rescue with acceptance to art school, the discovery of new friends and the proper marriage to one of those friends who happens to be a creator of children's books. That is followed by the birth of children, income from satisfying work as a designer and illustrator, and a growing sense of having arrived at a point on the path to shedding the dual stigmas of poverty and exile.
The trust in the good marriage turns out to last, until it doesn't. Its gradual dissolution begins with the impulsive acquisition of a status house on a status street in Park Slope, Brooklyn. In a series of segments, the delight and playfulness connected with the ownership of this house lead to fear and trembling, suspicions and magical thinking that evil dwells and breathes in the old walls of that too, too solid house, and reflects back on the life lived within them.
The "ideal" husband's secrets and betrayals can no longer be ignored, and the door to the couple's charmed, elegant life is broken down for good.
Eventually, the husband contracts the plague of the eighties, and their relationship reshapes itself. In separate apartments very near each other in lower Manhattan, the husband and wife become a sad and changed couple. But as the husband descends into the inevitable, a fairy tale ending presents itself to the wife, and her road to recovery begins.
STONE SOUP is a raw, yet engaging work of autofiction that will appeal to readers of literary fiction and memoirs, to all those fascinated by power couples of the publishing world, and to readers of NO PRETTY PICTURES who will, surely, want to know how it all arrives at this moment.
