Summer Brenner, Dust

I’m appreciating the ease of San Francisco writer Summer Brenner’s prose through her recent memoir, Dust (New York NY: Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), a book exploring her upbringing and family circumstances: from her father’s distraction, her mother’s deflections and entitlements, and her brother’s difficulties and enduring sweetness. In his blurb for the collection, James Nolan writes how Brenner “captures the tumultuous fifties and sixties of a genteel Jewish family in Atlanta, with the South’s oppressive segregation and anti-Semitism. The family drama is fraught: the brother is a schizophrenic, the mother is a Gucci-clad Medusa, and the father a suicide.” The prose is engaged, engaging; offering the distance of time but an immediacy of enormously rich detail. The language seems uncomplicated, but is crafted, riveting. As she begins the third chapter, “The Toy Store”: “In summer the daylight is nearly white. Its color is dulled by the flat, hot, heavy air. The sky and sun are buried in a white vapor that hangs like a starched sheet. The thick air presses down on everything. The nearby objects—my red wagon, my parents’ blue car, the houses—pulse with the heat around them. From the road, the asphalt sends up zigzag waves of heat.”

“Whenever the KKK marches through downtown,” Brenner writes, “they pass Leb’s. They deliberately choose a route that passes Leb’s. They wear long white robes and carry their hoods in their hands. They can’t hide behind their hoods. There’s a law now that makes them show their faces.” She continues:

I know about the KKK. I know they burn crosses and do things that I can’t let myself imagine. I know they hate Jews. They hate Blacks, Catholics, and Jews. Because Daddy stands up for the rights of Blacks, I worry they’ll come to our house. I worry they’ll burn a cross in our yard.
            At Leb’s our family likes to sit in a booth by the window. If the Klan is marching, I see them through the window. They’re grinning when they pass us. Or maybe grin is incorrect. Maybe grimace is the correct word. I see how proud and happy they are to march. I’ve been taught you’re only supposed to be proud of good things. I wonder if they think they’re good. I wonder if it makes them happy to hate.

There’s something quite stunning in the way she describes her childhood surroundings, from live-in maids and segregation to her father’s refusal to adhere to those artificially-drawn social and colour barriers, and the later discovery, in her teens, that her father had been a regular visitor at some of those same integrated jazz clubs as she, all in secret from her mother. “I tell Mother that she should go too. However,” she writes, “Mother doesn’t approve of mingling. She believes in rights but not mingling. She thinks mingling is stepping into other people’s business. Or maybe she’s afraid. Maybe equality is better in theory than practice.” Given how Brenner describes how she herself moves with the period, ending up in a commune in California with a small child by the 1960s, the distances she achieves through this break seem incredible. Her parents are set firmly within the context of their settings, as Brenner describes in detail how she lifts herself out of it, and into another.

It is a remarkable story of how one emerges, able to find clarity in one’s surroundings and chaos, and be able to step outside of it, seemingly unhindered by the limitations of her parents, of her community; of where and how she grew up. How she managed to emerge as a seemingly-emotionally healthy, capable and empathetic person. Through all the chaos. Through all the bluster and anger and resentment and turmoil, capturing the detail of a time and a place and a sense of it that is deeply compelling.