Overview

More than forty years afterleaving her native New Orleans as a young woman, Leta Weiss Marks awakened to the realisation that her family history there was almost beyond the horizon of living memory. Rescuing it, for herself and posterity, became her mission and brought her home again. In a compelling, elegant blend of fact and fiction, Marks weaves a tapestry of family members and events, drawing mainly upon interviews with her nonagenarian mother and aunt. Letters, archival research, and Marks's own recollections and imagination also contribute to the composition, which she calls """"a song of myself and my family."""" At the center are Marks's mother and father, and the highs and lows of their courtship and marriage. Caroline Dreyfous was born into a prominent Jewish family of New Orleans; Leon Weiss, seventeen years her senior, always struggled to gain their acceptance. He was an ambitious, talented architect, the driving force in the famous firm of Weiss, Dreyfous and Seiferth, chosen by Huey Long to design the new state capitol and governor's mansion, New Orleans' Charity Hospital, and other landmarks. He also was implicated in the """"Louisiana Scandals"""" and sentenced to two years in federal prison. Time's Tapestry is in part Marks's attempt to peel back her mother's reticent yet unwavering loyalty toward her father and understand this man, who died when Marks was only twenty-one and preparing to move to Connecticut. Stories and memories of three generations of the Dreyfous branch of the family tree complete Marks's portrait. She makes vivid not only the personalities of her kin but also the times in which they lived, conjuring the New Orleans of her great-grandfather, grandparents, parents, and own childhood, segregation, the alternate inclusion and exclusion of the Jewish community, the fervid politics of the Long era, and juxtaposing those scenes with her experiences as an adult returning to visit her family in a greatly changed city. Charming and evocative, a superb example of creative nonfiction, Time's Tapestry makes for both an intimate family album and a priceless record of New Orleans' cultural, social, and political history.

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9780807122051

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Reviews

Marks's self-described medley of truth and fantasy explores her family's history in New Orleans culture and her own experiences growing up Jewish in the segregated South. Though her long look back is spurred by a desire to learn her mother's life story after a stroke has compromised Carol Weiss's health, Marks (English and Writing/Univ. of Hartford) is most animated by the troubles of her father, Leon Weiss. Huey Long's chosen architect, Leon designed many of the buildings bankrolled by Long's million-dollar infrastructure project, including the governor's mansion and the Louisiana statehouse, where the Kingfish was gunned down in 1935. After Long's assassination, Weiss - portrayed here, not surprisingly, as an innocent man ruined by his trusting nature - was implicated in the financial scandals surrounding the administration and served prison time. Shielded from the controversy by her well-meaning parents as a child, Marks seeks answers about her father's culpability. From her mother she discovers little more than a sense of the family's ingrained stoicism, which caused her people to grieve silently and separately across the years. The focus on Leon is perhaps inevitable, since Carol defines her life by her undying loyalty to her husband, even years after his death. But when Marks turns to the history of her maternal family, her tale - lacking the front-page drama of Leon's ensnarement by Long's corrupt political machine - loses momentum in the fictional dramatizations she employs to fill gaps in the evidence. Of her upbringing she recalls having no clear picture of what being Jewish meant, since family members were only casual temple-goers. Interestingly, the prejudice felt by long-established American Jews toward first-generation Eastern European immigrants (which nearly prevented her parents from marrying) seems to have affected her family more than Southern anti-Semitism did. Marks gets no hard answers about her father, but she fashions a substantial and affecting memoir. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Leta Weiss Marks lives in Connecticut and is an instructor of English and writing at the University of Hartford. Mother of four and grandmother of eight, she visits them regularly at their far-flung homes in Seattle, Boston, and Hungary.

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