Sam Freedman

When I first started reading Samuel Freedman’s “Who She Was” I was hoping for a compelling story of a man in search of his mother’s past. However, within the first few pages of reading, I was extremely angered by his indifference and general attitude towards his mother. I could not believe that his mother’s passing was so meaningless to him. It took decades and the death of an aunt to compel him to even visit her grave.
I was not able to comprehend such disregard for the death of a parent. Comparatively, I lost my father to cancer as well, and when it happened it was the most devastating thing that could ever happen. I was not extremely close to him because he was always at work, but it was still horrible. The feelings of regret and anguish seemed as though they would never subside. So for someone to be so apathetic to his mother’s death, to me, was unacceptable.
It was not as though he had a bad relationship with her, he simply did not care. He did not want to get to know her and did not make an effort to even be a part of her life. When he finally decided that he cared enough to learn about her, it was only about thirty years too late. When he referred to the fact that he never thought of her as anyone other than his “father’s wife” I almost wanted to throw the book out the window. Reading about him exiling his mother when she visited him at college was so frustrating. It seemed to me that he was a terrible person and that I would never want to meet such a man.
Luckily, after hearing him speak, he was able to redeem himself. I admired him for the way that he tirelessly researched about his mother. It must have felt like some kind of atonement to finally show some kind of interest in his mother’s life. The only thing that I did not like about his method was that he treated her like a research project. The way that he looked for information about her was the way that people would usually go about researching a scientific topic and not really the way that one would find out about a loved one. It was almost as though he was conducting some type of investigation.
I think that if one wanted to really connect with a loved one on a higher level, they should do it because they want to. Freedman seemed to have really been motivated to learn about his mother; he seemed genuinely interested. It just seemed that he was about thirty years too late. If I had not met him and heard him talk about his experience and what he gained from doing the book, I think that I would have continued disliking him and not understanding where he was coming from.