Judy Lev | Author
Our Names Do Not Appear
Reviews
Our Names Do Not Appear is a vivid memoir of the heroine’s quest for an understanding of the void left in her life by the infant death of a younger brother. Reaching across the decades, and spanning cultural distances between Cleveland and Jerusalem, her quest leads her in the end to an intimate re-imagining of her own experience of family trauma. A richly moving story of a woman’s growth to insight and compassion. Aviva Zornberg​
Held captive by a familial tragedy she cannot remember, the writer liberates herself through constructing an astonishing narrative. Judy Lev renders her younger brother’s forgotten death in striking prose, engages the fictive imagination in the father’s first-person narrative, and employs an analytic intellect in courageous personal essays. OUR NAMES DO NOT APPEAR is a bold literary tour de force that transcends genre—a searing triumph of postmodernism! Allen Hoffman, author of the SMALL WORLDS series.
Our Names Do Not Appear is a beautiful, moving memoir that explores the author’s life-long journey to understand her grief at the loss of her baby brother. In the world of 1950s Shaker Heights, Ohio, there was no acknowledgement or room for Judy (age 5) and her sister to mourn their brother Joey’s short life. As an adult, Judy sets out to learn both the facts and the emotional truths surrounding his death. Through essays that are part investigative, part imaginative memoir, Judy chronicles her quest for answers with great compassion for her family, particularly for her parents. “I wrote the story I needed,” she said in our May Literary Modiin event. Here is the YouTube recording I suspect that a great many people have dealt with the consequences of a trauma that has been ignored. Judy’s story is thus one we all need. Julie Zuckerman
I was so drawn into this beautifully written journey that l let my “to do” list go for three days and ordered several more copies for friends. Lev’s prose is beautiful and her warmth and dry wit are laced throughout. The profound effects of early childhood experiences on lifelong growth and development are sensitively demonstrated. Lev’s depiction of 1950’s suburban life in midwest America brought back my childhood and the descriptions of life in Israel made me want to travel there and see for myself. Judy Lev writes with such openness and depth that you feel like you are accompanying a friend throughout.
From the very first page this book sucked me in, with an animated description of a mother caring for her seriously ill son, then rushing him to the emergency room...
Her son’s hospitalization brings up the trauma of losing her five-year old brother Joey many years previously. After her son’s recovery, the author searches obsessively for information about Joey, the brother she barely knew. With persistence, imagination, and dedication, she learns more and more about how Joey lived and died. Based on this, in the second half of the book, she reenacts what happened.
This book is a wonderful example of how trauma can linger for years and suddenly spring up unexpectedly. It shows how exploring past trauma can be cathartic and can also help others work through their childhood traumas. Highly recommended. A fascinating read. Ava Carmel
From the very first page this book sucked me in, with an animated description of a mother caring for her seriously ill son, then rushing him to the emergency room...
Her son’s hospitalization brings up the trauma of losing her five-year old brother Joey many years previously. After her son’s recovery, the author searches obsessively for information about Joey, the brother she barely knew. With persistence, imagination, and dedication, she learns more and more about how Joey lived and died. Based on this, in the second half of the book, she reenacts what happened.
This book is a wonderful example of how trauma can linger for years and suddenly spring up unexpectedly. It shows how exploring past trauma can be cathartic and can also help others work through their childhood traumas. Highly recommended. A fascinating read. Ava Carmel
We are all gatekeepers of untidy gardens, untended patches of hurt, confusion, and dissonance rampant with weeds that purposefully impede our growth. In her memoir, Our Names Do Not Appear, Judy Lev bravely shares her journey through the looking glass to her early childhood experiences and remakes the tragedy and emotional vacuum surrounding the death of her baby brother, Joey. Judy draws us straight into 1950s Shaker Heights where she searches for the truth about Joey’s short life. Her discoveries boomerang decades forward into Judy’s life as a wife and mother. I admire Judy’s honest writing about the perpetual effect of grief. Beth Malichi
Lev׳s courageous and deeply moving exploration of family secrets and the role they played in the coming of age of a deeply insightful and lyrical author moved me to tears.
I highly recommend reading this combination memoir and fictionalized autobiography.
Judy captures perfectly the environments of growing up in an upwardly mobile middle-class Shaker Heights family and then in an adopted family of new ‘Anglo’ immigrants in Jerusalem. Highly recommended!
I couldn’t put this book down! The combination of Lev’s witty writing, a deep look into trauma and how we hold grief within us, the juxtaposition of memoir and fictional memoir - not an easy thing to pull off – but Lev has done so by seamlessly by weaving imagination and fact - takes the reader deep inside the experience of loss against the backdrop of mid-western American culture and the holiness of the city of Jerusalem. I’m going to read it all over again. Reva Mann
Through investigation, memoir and fantasy, Judy brings the reader into her quest to discover, understand and “name” her past, and so, to break its hold on her. Judy’s light touch makes Our Names Do Not Appear a tender story that encouraged me to reflect on my own silences and secrets, to forgive, and to reclaim my own voice in the present. A beautiful must-read! Sarah Kreimer
The book shows the power of pain that is ignored. Like s psychological thriller you learn how peeling away resistance to grief results in a soul becoming stronger with a new level of self-awareness, and how we are often hurt by people who are trying to protect us. The book is a must for anyone who has suffered from the trauma of family secrets.
This is a compelling, well written, historically accurate window into the complex intergenerational family's continuing reactions to the tragedy of the premature birth, short life and somewhat mysterious death, of a severely disabled child. Joel L.
An exquisitely poetic and uniquely styled memoir, “Our Names Do Not Appear” insistently drew me into its heart-wrenching pages. In this journey of unresolved grief, Judy Lev presents her child-self in a way that even while knowing this story was written by a mature woman, I could experience this child as though she were in the room with me, actually speaking the words on the page when confronted with her loss, when practically pleading for comfort as she buries herself sobbing into her mother’s apron, in her desperate letters to her past teachers, and throughout her determination to understand what had happened. It was the child’s loss that I felt while reading the author’s words. So skilfully did she express the child’s point of view, that “the little one”, as she was referred to, allowed me to see her young face, and experience the young Judy throughout, her “invisibility” notwithstanding. Margalit Jakob
In this heroic quest to dreg up the unmentionable, most of the adults severely miss the mark, and yet remarkably, Lev is able to trace her parents’ narrative, both through her own adult eyes and through entering the persona of her father with compassion and empathy.
Our Names Do Not Appear recounts the solving of a personal and deeply troubling family mystery story—part investigation, part imaginative tale. It unfolds as an engrossing, gorgeous, and intimate account of a woman’s life-long passage from childhood innocence through haunting grief to a mature reckoning with self and family, leading us through Jewish tradition, culture, and history to a place of peace and enlightenment—for both the author and the reader. It is a powerful and moving story, a book that matters. Philip Gerard, author of Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life.
This is a compelling and fascinating exploration of grief, entirely unique. Fred Leebron, co-author of Creating Fiction: A Writer’s Companion