WHISPERS, SHADOWS, AND SAINTS is a cuttingly honest memoir set in New York City from the 1960s to the early 70s. At this time, Nancy Heart (a first-generation American) endured a tumultuous, abusive home life with her Hungarian mother.
This relationship looms large. The psychological and physical abuse that Heart suffered at her hands went deep, and pronouncements of the disappointment her arrival (her mother had hoped for a son) cut to the quick—as they would with any child. There was no respite to be had outside the walls of their apartment either, as Nancy ran the gauntlet on her way to school between groups of gang members and, later, a procession of pimps and prostitutes. Heart’s grandmother, affectionately called “Big Mama,” was kind and caring, but had her own life to lead. Islands of stability, such as formative teachers and caring friends, were thin on the horizon. Heart coped with her mother’s depredations by invoking the “Whispers” of the book’s title, as well as a “Divine Being” who watched over her.
Heart’s writing style is polished and authoritative. Writing about herself in the third person, frequent inclusions of her inner monologue allow her to have it both ways. This effectively allows for the expression of her innermost thoughts and feelings while maintaining a certain distance from what must be highly traumatic memories. In her hands, a straightforward statement such as “bad events didn’t give someone the right to ruin everyone’s life” (in reference to her mother’s behavior) attains the status of an aphorism. Heart doesn’t demonstrate it so much as simply assert it to be so. With a child’s grasp of reality, the younger Heart apprehended her mother as being “meshuga” (crazy). Aside from the horrible incidences of physical maltreatment and neglect, it is easy to see how such incidents as being led by her mother to watch pornographic movies in a down-at-heel cinema or watching hippies make love in the public parks would have inclined her to this conclusion.
Her mother’s tragedy was, in fact, longstanding. She grew up in a Hungarian Jewish family that found themselves confined to a ghetto. Heart movingly describes the abominable conditions of a community in which rabbis counseled the inhabitants to believe in the salvation of God one day when they themselves disappeared the next, or where soldiers bayoneted beds on the suspicion of finding people concealed below them. It’s not hard to see how such trauma reverberates down the generations; and Heart, to her credit, reflects generously on this at the book’s conclusion—nursing injuries inflicted by “the monster that arose from within her mother.”
WHISPERS, SHADOWS, AND SAINTS is no easy read, but undoubtedly a deeply affecting one. It is beyond tragic to discover the effect the complete absence of unconditional love has on a child.
Nancy Heart’s WHISPERS, SHADOWS, AND SAINTS offers a heart-rending and emotionally uncompromising glimpse into the goings-on of an abusive childhood, as well as the trauma that led to it.
~ Craig Jones for IndieReader