Terese Svoboda's Hitler and my Mother-in-Law
The art of confabulation
This week’s post is a bit outside my usual area of Canadian poetry; it’s Terese Svoboda’s newly released prose memoir centred around her American mother-in-law’s time as a war correspondent for the popular magazine Woman’s Home Companion. Svoboda interleaves her mother-in-law’s stories with episodes from her own adventurous life, and with her efforts to validate said stories from evidence. The spark for the book is a purported photograph of Pat, the mother-in-law, pointing at Hitler’s ashes—but the photograph itself has vanished, and even if real, what would it mean? In what sense does a picture of a person standing next to a random ash heap serve as proof of anything in particular? Yet the fact that this photograph is talked about, is referenced as important, makes it meaningful. What, then, is this thing we call meaning?
Svoboda poses a question that obsesses me as well: “Are stories just lies with satisfactory endings? Or are stories the tweaking of memories and anecdotes to make meaning out of the chaos of our lives?” Personally I’m suspicious of story, the ways in which the narrative format distorts our view of factual data and raw experience. Svoboda shares this suspicion, yet she is herself a riproaring storyteller. Author of 24 books across forms and genres, a documentary filmmaker, and an opera librettist, she’s astoundingly accomplished at crafting a compelling tale. Moreover, if Pat’s stories seem a bit over-the-top and unbelievable, well, so do Svoboda’s—not that I don’t believe her, but that of course someone who did fieldwork with the Nuer in Sudan and produced shows for PBS and won a Guggenheim would also have a mother-in-law who covered Dachau and served as Director of Information for UNICEF and was the sole civilian to have been appointed mayor of a German town, Berchtesgaden, during wartime. Svoboda knows what she’s doing, does it well, and is doing it here.
The book moves briskly through history and through the more personal turning points in the lives of its protagonists. The fragmentary nature of memory is reflected in the format, where brief chapters are divided into briefer subsections rarely running longer than a couple of pages. It makes for rapid and compulsive reading. Here we’ve got everything from The Monuments Men to the McCarthy era to the mixture of lies and truth that can coexist inside a marriage.
“Erosion of the truth equals confusion,” Svoboda asserts. “This is easy to see in those 2020 elections, with fake news, doctored videos, mashup photos and the bewildered disenfranchised electorate, and even more so in 2024.” But fake news and doctored truth isn’t the sole provenance of one political movement, or even of politics as such. Truth and inconsistency may sit much closer to home:
“The manipulation of truth can be pervasive and sometimes even unconscious. Why does your mother mention your sister’s grade point average so often? Is truth just a matter of who is the better persuader and who’s listening when?”
Publication details
Author: Terese Svoboda
Title: Hitler and my Mother-in-Law
Publisher: OR Books
Year: 2025