I met Barry Menikoff a couple of times. The first time was at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California and the second time when he was a visiting professor here in Boulder. A Robert Louis Stevenson specialist, he was; I've had a fondness for RLS from my childhood, and I've read a substantial percentage of his voluminous works, so we had something to talk about. Menikoff was then teaching in Hawaii and mighty anxious to find his way back to the mainland.
I knew nothing of his childhood except that like me he was a Brooklyn boy. Then, a while ago, I heard through a mutual acquaintance that he had written a memoir of his childhood and youth. And so he has. It's called Stone Mother, and it's privately printed but available on Amazon, and it's a damn good book that might with a few judicious edits have been a successful commercial publication.
I used to tell my friends that I was the most naive boy in the history of the known universe ever to arrive on a college campus. But now I have a competitor. Menikoff knew a lot of things -- principally how to survive the death of his mother and the disappearance and neglect of his father, so he was not without resources. Socially, he was behindhand, and in terms of books and intellectual life, he was nowhere. It was quite an achievement for him to get from Brownsville to Brooklyn College and then on to a successful career as a teacher and scholar.
I think that what I liked best about this memoir is its honesty. It tells the truth and by doing so creates a strong, credible picture of Brooklyn life back then,
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