A COMEDY OF CHILDHOOD

Edward Hirsch

7:30 p.m. Thursday, September 4, 2025

Page Hall - University at Albany Downtown Campus
135 Western Avenue, Albany NY 12203 See map.

Edward Hirsch is a major American poet, advocate for the art of poetry, and president of the Guggenheim Foundation. His new memoir is My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy (2025). Kirkus Reviews said, “Hirsch channels the voices and personalities of his Chicagoland Jewish childhood to create a memoir composed of jokes and short vignettes, one setup-and-punchline after another… sometimes silly, sometimes off-color, often Yiddish-flavored, with a penchant for puns and dad jokes that never quits…. A unique recreation of a great life in a largely vanished world.”

His 1999 book, How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry, was a national bestseller.

Cosponsored by the Jewish Federation of Northeastern New York.

(Photo credit: Michael Lionstar)

from the publisher:

From the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of an aspiring middle-class Jewish family whose hard-boiled American values and wit were the forge of a poet’s coming-of-age.

“My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water. . . . They didn’t expect an entire book,” Hirsch says in the “prologue” to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In microchapters — sometimes only a single scathing sentence long — with titles like “Call to Breakfast,” “Pay Cash,” “The Sorrow of Manly Sports,” and “Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue,” Eddie’s gambling father, Ruby, son of a white metal smelter, schools him and his sister in blackjack; Eddie’s mom bangs pots to wake the kids to a breakfast of cold cereal; Uncle Bob, in the collection business, is heard threatening people on the phone; and nobody suffers fools. In this household, Eddie learned to jab with his left and cross with his right, never to kid a kidder, and how to sneak out at night.

Affectionate, deadpan, and exuberant, steeped in Yiddishkeit and Midwestern practicality, Hirsch’s laugh-and-cry performance animates a heartbreaking odyssey, from the cradle to the day he leaves home, armed with sorrow and a huge store of poetic wit. Read more

Reviews

“My Childhood in Pieces is a hilarious poignant memoir by a wonderful, generous writer. . . . It’s a collection of the broken pieces, scraps of Hirsch’s youth that he has summoned and arranged for the smelter of the reader’s imagination. . . . The project is to bring the past alive, piece by piece, scene by scene, and for the reader to experience it through young Edward’s eyes, to feel and understand how place, milieu, culture and family shaped him. . . . The book sustains its humor, clarity and smarts, as well as the integrity of its form.” — The Washington Post

“Hirsch recounts his rough-and-tumble Chicago and Skokie childhood in ingeniously distilled comedic bits. . . . Wisecracks, mischief, trouble, arguments, cruelties, absurdities, and deceit are all delivered with a stand-up comic’s precision and a poet’s gift for exhilarating and droll wordplay. This card-slapping, dice-rolling, nimbly riffing, heart-wrenching remembrance is glorious in its pain and love, humor and wonder.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Amazingly original. . . . It’s an aphoristic autobiography that reads like a stand-up routine but feels like a series of Kafkaesque punchlines in pursuit of a perfect pierogi. There is something dizzying and delightful about his presentation here—a book-length series of brief prose vignettes (usually running anywhere between two to 10 lines) that relate Hirsch’s childhood and family history in Skokie, IL. Told with such exuberance, precision, and wit, each vignette feels almost like a perfect poem or piece of eternity. [My Childhood in Pieces] is so charming and compulsively readable that readers will find it hard to put down.” — Library Journal (starred review)

“The triumph of My Childhood in Pieces is that it is able to capture a specific Jewish American experience not only in content but also in form. . . quick, deadpan. . . yet concentrated with life. . . . Perhaps the microchapter that best serves as an ars poetica is “Conversation with My Mother”: “My mother was heating a can of chicken soup on the stove. ‘You really shouldn’t make fun of me,’ I said, ‘you’re my mother.’ She barely turned her head. ‘Don’t be so sure, kid.’” . . . My Childhood in Pieces commemorates a family’s survival with the same tough love used to survive it.” — Jewish Book Council