Told in the author’s late grandmother’s voice, Nobody Will Tell You This But Me: A True (As Told To Me) Story by Bess Kalb is a poignant, hilarious memoir. A love letter to the author’s outspoken, opinionated, beloved grandmother with whom Kalb shared a close relationship, it is also the story of three generations of women in the author’s maternal line. Prose in her grandmother’s voice is interspersed with transcriptions of phone conversations with her grandmother and voicemails from her grandmother as well as family photographs.
In her grandmother Bobby’s inimitable voice, Kalb tells the story of her great-grandmother’s immigration as a 12 year old girl fleeing the violent pogroms in Russia and traveling alone across the European continent to board a ship bound for America. Later Bobby, a firecracker of a woman who knows what she wants, isn’t afraid of secretly marrying the man she knows to be the love of her life—at least until she can secure her parents’ approval of the match. Bobby also addresses the difficulty and prickliness that characterized her relationship with her own daughter Robin, Kalb’s mother. Perhaps most touching is the love story between Bobby and her granddaughter, Kalb. As hard and wrought as Bobby’s mother/daughter relationship was with Robin, with Robin’s daughter, Bess, she shares a relationship characterized by an uncommon closeness, fierce loyalty, and loving adoration.
This is also a story of the universal American Dream of an immigrant family building a wealthy, successful life for themselves as told through the eyes of multiple generations of its women. Nobody Will Tell You This But Me is a highly readable, witty, emotional, original memoir with a warmly beating heart at its center and told in the vivid voice of its beloved matriarch.
A Series of (Un)Fortunate Reviews 