In South of My Dreams (U of SC Press 2024)a part detailed memoir, part therapy session, we follow F. K. Clementi, the author of, as she searches the world, from her birthplace in Rome, to Poland, to an Israeli kibbutz, and finally to New York City in America, the place of her fantasized dreams. Only the dreams are never what she has hoped. It is not until after many a traumatic detour, that Clementi seems to have found herself where she truly belongs . . . in a deep South state, an educator with a couple of pets, a single woman with a comforting view of the marsh.
The writing in this 360-page book is mesmerizing. Educated and employed in a variety of literary positions from Europe to the Middle East to America, the only child of bourgeois parents, Fania Clementi had spent her youth dismissing her mother’s gifts of expensive clothes and learn-abroad trips as simply ways to control her. As time goes on, the author expands her firing range of personal injustices, sensing not only parental over-control, but misogyny, racism, and anti-Semitism at every turn. This is an angry and arrogant young woman, who though she develops strong friendships, appears to be always expecting trouble and people who will let her down.
But opportunities keep presenting themselves. It is clear that Clementi is a talented linguist, translator, and fledgling journalist with experience living on a Jerusalem kibbutz, and working in Warsaw. So, with an impulsive “bet the farm” move to her dreamed-of New York, Clementi finds herself not only employed, but offered a place in a prestigious PhD program at Brandeis University in Boston. Of course, it’s not NYC, so, Fania can’t allow herself to really be happy. However, over-riding all other concerns is her single-focus on obtaining a U.S. green card in order to stay in America.
F.K. Clementi
How to obtain the essential green “ticket” to her fantasized good life leads the author into years of dysfunctional personal relationships and even a brush with death. Her single-minded goal becomes finding an American man to marry her and make her forever legal. Dating and sleeping with “100s of men,” she ultimately becomes engaged to a rich young banker, who alternates between affection and abuse. Once married, she relates his nearly killing her in several different ways. Finally divorced, she hurls herself back into her studies, avoiding relationships by working four and five simultaneous jobs.
Despite a tumultuous and unfocused life, (except for the green card), Clementi is a superb writer. She wields sarcastic wit and aims angry cudgels at the people and events that have “gotten in her way,” but she also tells us about New York in the 90s—Central Park’s beauty, the cold of walk-up flats, the potpourri of ethnicities that excite her, of a glitzy shop that is either “retro-chic or avant merde.” Her intellectual panorama allows her to quote Machiavelli, Elie Wisel, Ovid, and Descartes in a couple of pages and lets us “get it.” But when she wants, the sardonic wit can cut deep, as when, like a mean stand-up comic, she speaks of the residents of South Carolina and the South in general with their “unintelligible accents, their overweight, and their lack of curiosity.”
Still, South Carolina is where Fania Clementi has today found peace. She is professor of English and Jewish Studies at the University of South Carolina. Though she has employed a therapist or psychoanalyst, even a medium, through every phase of her boomeranging existence, she writes that at last in the Low-Country of salt-marches and sleepy tides, away from the big city dreams that had driven her whole life, she has found the peace she always dreamed of. With a couple of pets, a big garden, and a house on Fripp Island, that will do just fine.
Leave a Reply