Pass Through

'Welcome to San Diego,' the book begins, sardonically, given how ill at ease Fredman feels as a young Jew and aspiring poet in his seemingly paradisal hometown. In short chapters that read like prose poems, he retrieves and assembles pieces of memory and sets them against one another, building an exquisite architecture of experiences-as Jew, Californian, poet, drummer, surfer, hippie, and professor-brought into conjunction by attempts to make sense of them, studded with words hefted like stones. ' Early in this lucid, compelling, and often profound memoir, Stephen Fredman writes: 'A pass through that I took for granted and that seemed effortless no longer was.' Fredman’s aim in this book is to take account not only of his experience but of the difficulty of taking account of experience, of translating and shaping it into a meaningful whole; and so the 'pass through' (normally a window-like opening for passing dishes from the kitchen through to the dining room) serves as his central metaphor and title. The book unfolds as a series of 'memory pieces,' vignettes that develop organically from one to the next but do not move chronologically or in a linear fashion. Memory leads seamlessly to a series of embedded reflections. Along the way we are given marvelous portraits of the author’s parents, of childhood and adolescent friends, and of the poets and intellectuals who would shape his thinking and scholarly career (Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, George Steiner). We move from California to Indiana, from the Berkeley of the sixties to the University Notre Dame. A deeply personal book, Pass Through is also one that reaches out to embrace the reader wherever he or she can be found.'-Henry Weinfield, author of As the Crow Flies 6