It’s not unusual for people who have lived compelling lives to hear: “You should write a book.”
Laguna Woods resident Barbara Wolk, a retired Spanish and English as a Second Language teacher, did just that. Under the pen name Diana Kingsley, she wrote “Mother in Name Only.”
Written with emotional and intelligent clarity, the novel illuminates Wolk’s life growing up in New York as a “nice Jewish girl” saddled with all the constraints of coming of age in the 1950s and ’60s. That meant being taught to be obedient and chaste, to present the right appearances in manners and looks and, if need be, to be ready to forgive and forget transgressions – especially those committed by the opposite sex.
In the book, Wolk has become Myrna Kaye – Kramer after her marriage to Eli, a successful but icy lawyer – with a sister, Sandra, and their parents.
Wolk writes of the sisters’ upbringing by a mother who did not have the emotional and intellectual capability to raise the girls under anything but unyielding authority. It was their father who provided warmth, love and emotional support and a measure of stability. He held the family together until the mother ran off to pursue an artistic calling.
Her departure embodied the emotional absence of a woman who described herself to Myrna as “a mother in name only.”
The title also alludes to Myrna herself. After she was raped and impregnated by an old flame, her husband forced her to give the boy up for adoption.
“I had to make a difficult decision when I got pregnant – whether my husband would know – and decided that I had to do the right thing, to let him know that he was not the father of this child,” Wolk recalled in an interview in her home in the Towers. “I paid a heavy price. I felt like I, too, was a mother in name only.”
Over twists and turns, and with the help of a psychiatrist, she reconnected with her son, but in doing so, she lost connection to her eldest son and, for a…
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