Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America

Home Fires is the powerful saga of the Gordon family–real people, names unchanged. Spanning nearly five decades, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, their story has the scope, depth, wealth of incident, and emotional intensity of a great novel, and an abundance of humor, scandal, warmth, and trauma–the recognizable components of family life. In the hands of Donald Katz, it is also a masterful chronicle of the turbulent postwar era, brilliantly illuminating the interplay between private life and profound cultural changes. Katz begins his account in 1945, when Sam Gordon, an electrician, comes home from the war to his young wife, Eve, and their two-year-old daughter, Susan, eager to move his family into the growing middle class and the good life that beckons all around them. After a few years of apartment life in the Bronx, where they have another little girl and become the first on their block to own a TV, Sam and Eve move to a new Long Island subdivision and have two more children. As the fifties yield to the sixties, the younger Gordons begin to fly out and away into the culture like shrapnel from an artillery shell, each tracing a unique trajectory: Susan, early into rock ‘n’ roll and civil rights, Vassar girl, pioneer feminist, author of The Politics of Orgasm, and recovering drug addict; Lorraine, teenage beatnik and young leftie, one-time member of a women’s rock band, longtime follower of Indian religious teacher Swami Satchidananda; Sheila, the good daughter who married the high school heartthrob, then remarried, with a big suburban house, two kids, a therapist, and a budding career as a painter; and Ricky, the youngest, witness to the family traumas and cause of a few himself, openly gay, eclectically New Age, and a successful songwriter and composer.