Kim Chernin - Biography

Kim Chernin (born May 7, 1940, Bronx, New York) is an American fiction and nonfiction writer, feminist, poet, and memoirist. She has published fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

Biography

Kim Chernin was born on May 7, 1940, in the Bronx, New York. Her parents, Rose Chernin and Paul Kusnitz, were Russian-born Jewish immigrants who were Marxist and Communist Party organizers for much of their lives. Chernin's childhood was influenced by the death of her older sister, Nina, to Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Shortly after Nina's death, the Chernin family relocated to Los Angeles to be near relatives. Her mother resumed full-time work as a party organizer and in 1951 made national headline news when she was arrested for "advocating the overthrow of the government." She was later called before the House Un-American Activities Committee for her work as a party organizer. The U.S. government tried unsuccessfully to denaturalize her and deprive her of citizenship for such activities.

Kim Chernin was also active in the Party, organizing in the Labor Youth League and, upon graduation from high school, traveling to Moscow for the Seventh World Festival of Youth and Students. In her memoir, In My Mother's House, Chernin writes:

Chernin moved to Berkeley to attend the University of California, Berkeley and married David Netboy at the age of 18. In 1963, her only child, Larissa, was born while she was studying at Trinity College, Dublin. She divorced seven years later, subsequently also marrying and divorcing Robert Cantor, before settling into a long-term relationship with her current partner Renate Stendhal, with whom she co-wrote Sex and Other Sacred Games and Cecilia Bartoli: The Passion of Song. She currently lives in Point Reyes, California, where she writes and works as a psychotherapist. She is a guest instructor at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. She has been featured on radio, including National Public Radio.

Writing

Kim Chernin's work spans a number of different genres: memoir, fiction, poetry, psychological study, and a study of women's search for self.

Chernin has written a trilogy of books about women and eating disorders, Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness, The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity, and Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search of Herself.

In The Flame Bearers, which was a 1987 New York Times Notable Book, Chernin challenges women's exclusion from traditional Judaism. Chernin creates the Flame Bearers, a sect of women who are Jewish, yet not traditional observers; when these women read the Holy Book, they reconstruct Old Testament stories to reassert the days before women were excluded from Orthodoxy.

In My Mother's House describes the mother-to-daughter bonding between generations of Chernin women, effected through Rose's telling of tales and through daughter Kim's ability to set them down. Of In My Mother's House, Chernin says: "Writing that book I was . . . preoccupied with the struggle to be different from my mother."

Cecilia Bartoli: The Passion of Song is a biography of Cecilia Bartoli, the opera singer and recitalist, written with Renate Stendhal.

Chernin's work has frequently been praised by renowned feminist writer Alice Walker. Her papers were acquired by the Schlesinger Library of Harvard University in 2003.

Her latest book, Everywhere a Guest, Nowhere at Home: A New Vision of Israel and Palestine, was released on September 1, 2009.

Books

Non-fiction

• The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness: Harper & Row (1981); ISBN 0060925051
• The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity: Times Books (1985); ISBN 0060925043
• Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search of Herself: Times Books (1987); ISBN 0060925035
• The Woman Who Gave Birth to Her Mother: Viking (1998); ISBN 0140284664
• Seven Pillars of Jewish Denial: Shekinah, Wagner, and the Politics of the Small: North Atlantic Books (March 2, 2004); ISBN 1556434863
• Everywhere a Guest, Nowhere at Home: A New Vision of Israel and Palestine: North Atlantic Books (September 1, 2009); ISBN 1556438206

Poetry

• The Hunger Song: The Menard Press (January 1983); ISBN 0903400804

Fiction

• The Flame Bearers: A Novel: Random House (1986); ISBN 0060971134
• Sex and Other Sacred Games: Crown (July 1, 1989); ISBN 081291676X (with Renate Stendhal)
• The Girl Who Went and Saw and Came Back: Edgework Books; (February 2002); ISBN 1931223009

Memoirs

• In My Mother's House: Ticknor & Fields (1983); ISBN 193156132X
• Crossing the Border: An Erotic Autobiography: The Women's Press Ltd (October 13, 1994); ISBN 0704344149
• A Different Kind of Listening: My Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow: Perennial (January 1996); ISBN 0060926899
• In My Father's Garden: A Daughter's Search for a Spiritual Life: Algonquin Books (January 7, 1996); ISBN 1565121007
• My Life as a Boy: A Woman's Story: Algonquin Books (January 5, 1997); ISBN 1565121635

Biography

• Cecilia Bartoli: The Passion of Song: Trafalgar Square Publishing; (November 1999); ISBN 0704346230 (with Renate Stendhal)

External links

• Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution from the Jewish Women's Archive