Posted on May 30, 2008 by Steve Pollak
As an investigative journalist in New York City, Marie Brenner (pictured right) certainly faced a lot of tough assignments in her career. As a writer at large for Vanity Fair magazine, she penned a 1996 exposé about the tobacco industry entitled, "The Man Who Knew Too Much." The influential article was subsequently adapted into the 1999 film, "The Insider," starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino.
In her personal life, she would ultimately fall back on her investigative abilities to pick apart what had to be one of her most difficult subjects: her brother.
The result is her new book, "Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found."
As you can guess from the book's title, Marie and her brother, Carl, could not have been much more different. Raised in what the New Yorker described as 'an eccentric Jewish Texan family,' Carl became a staunch conservative who gave up his career as a trial lawyer to grow apples in Washington State while Marie grew up to become a New York City liberal. The book recounts their re-connecting late in life after Carl is diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer called adenocarcinoma. Ultimately, he took his own life in early 2003.
The review by Michiko Kakutani in the May 20, 2008 edition of The New York Times placed the contrast between the siblings in stark relief:
Ms. Brenner writes that her mother used to call Carl and her “Apples and Oranges,” and the two could not be more different. The Texas girl, who wore pink pantsuits and a fall in college, would become the quintessential New Yorker, who wears lots of black, lives in “a wind tunnel of paper” and sneaks Zone bars in the afternoon, worrying about the 200 calories. As a reporter, she knows “whom to call in Afghanistan to get a fixer and who can take you into the troubled mosques in the banlieues of Paris.”
Carl, who belonged to the John Birch Society as a teenager, praises George W. Bush as “a great man,” and accuses his sister and her “A.C.L.U. friends in New York” of not understanding “how the people in this country think.” He regularly listens to Mexican radio “to keep up his Spanish” and takes tango lessons, “moving awkwardly around the floor in his Brooks Brothers shirts and penny loafers.” His decision at the age of 35 to give up his career as a trial lawyer and become “the Howard Roark of fruit” is regarded with astonishment and derision by his family, who refer to him as the “Apple Man.” “Carl,” his father says, “Jews don’t farm.”
Her father's statement notwithstanding, Carl apparently developed an interest in Christianity and converted. In an excerpt of the first chapter posted on the Web site for the book, Marie talks about seeing a copy of the New Testament at Carl's place and notes that he begins every meal with, "Father Jesus, we pray for our troops in Iraq."
I hope it's something Marie goes into in the book because I'm always fascinated by people who leave the faith. To me, it's an extraordinary decision. Who'd want to leave? But, then again, I suppose some people make up their minds to do something and there's no stopping them (like deciding to give up a career in the law to grow apples). Afterward, the family has got to decide on how to proceed with the relationship. For Jews of every stripe, conversion is a very sensitive topic so I'm curious to see what happened in the Brenner family.
As the Times review notes, the book includes richly-drawn portraits of several Brenner family members:
In the process of recounting the story of her relationship with her brother, Ms. Brenner also gives us a wonderfully vivid picture of her uncommon family: her grandfather Isidor, who made and lost and made five fortunes in Mexico and Texas; her father, Milton, who always sounded “very Texas, boastful and confident as if he’d been born in a uniform”; her mother, Thelma, who as an organizer of San Antonio Mothers for Peace made plans to confront Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara in his hotel room (“If I look chic, maybe he’ll let us in”); and her Aunt Anita, who posed for the photographer Edward Weston, interviewed Trotsky and hung out in Mexico with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and José Clemente Orozco.
Ms. Brenner tracks the leitmotifs that run through their lives, the patterns — of sibling estrangements, of fresh starts and do-overs — that have stamped their family tree, and in doing so she has given us a beautifully observed and deeply affecting memoir, a book written with the unsparing eye of a journalist and the aching heart of a sister who learned in March of 2003 that her ailing brother had killed himself.
"Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found" is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (288 pages).
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