In My Mother's House

Available November 1st 2008



A memoir of Long Beach, Long Island, New York
  • Cab Calloway sang here, Rudolph Valentino lived here, John O’Hara’s Butterfield 8 was inspired here, Billy Crystal grew up here: Long Beach on Long Island outside New York City is a storied spot on the Atlantic Ocean. Beyond the glittering hotels along its boardwalk are quaint family neighborhoods, where immigrants from Sicily, Poland and Ireland--fleeing their first stop in Brooklyn-- came to raise their children in the 1930s. This is the world that Stephanie Kaplan Cohen captures in fifty heart-rending vignettes, describing growing up in the remarkable Kaplan family in the house her mother bought on her own. As this eccentric family grew, her mother’s house was the stage for surprises and sorrows, joys and despair that Stephanie Kaplan Cohen describes in stark prose that will speak to anyone who was ever a child.


What People Are Saying!
  • "I took time this weekend to read In My Mother’s House. Truly well done! It was such a luxury to be able to read a book that is so well-written I could read it through at one sitting."
    • Susan Baugh
    Executive Director, Atkins House
    York, Pennsylvania

  • "In In My Mother’s House, the author has amazing recall from those early years. Stephanie Kaplan Cohen’s vivid memories - many of which all girls experience in some way—are often hurtful and insensitive but always compelling."
    • Erna Brot,
    Riverdale, New York

  • "The voices in In My Mother’s House were unbelievably real to me. I laughed out loud with the section, "The Curse" -- and I rarely do that when I'm reading... a chuckle maybe but that story was a gift to me! I could hear the author’s voice and her mother's voice so well, the scene played out in my mind's eye like a movie!"
    • Angela Tehaan Leone
    Novelist, Swimming Towards the Light


    About Stephanie

    		 IN MY MOTHER’S HOUSE a memoir by Stephanie Kaplan Cohen

    Like Pearl Buck and Colette, Stephanie Kaplan Cohen has recaptured here a childhood through the setting of her mother’s house. Stephanie’s mother was determined to raise her children in the safety of the suburbs, so the family moved to Long Beach, Long Island in 1930 when fewer than 17,000 Jews lived on Long Island.

    Stephanie’s story puts the thirties in a new light: as a time when science and technology were making inroads into daily life. The Kaplans still had a coal furnace but also boasted a radio, a refrigerator and a new car every year. The modernization that she describes includes popular culture (she loved Nancy Drew), a relaxed attitude towards religion (her father played pinochle on Yom Kippur) and a rapidly evolving medical profession that addressed the childhood ailments of the Cohen girls with mixed success.

    The originality of Stephanie’s style and the acuity of her insights make this powerful personal history both illuminating and amusing.

    An adult book recommended for teenaged readers