Amusement Park Ride

I just finished a book I'd been reading in inches, but I had the time to plow through the last half of it today. It's new, out this month: Sweet and Low: A Family Story, about the inventor of Sweet’N Low sugar substitute, Ben Eisenstadt. The author, Rich Cohen, is Eisenstadt’s grandson, so the book is not simply a biography but also a memoir –- and highly entertaining in both regards.

It’s about immigration and about Jews in Brooklyn in the first half of the 20th century, and about achievement, eccentricity, parceling out love, the mob, corruption, sugar, saccharine, science, commerce, and family -- and feuds: Rich Cohen’s branch of the family was disinherited by his grandmother, Ben Eisenstadt’s widow.

“To be disinherited is to be set free,” Cohen writes, but this isn’t a vindictive book. Besides being very funny and fabulously written, it does what the best biographies and memoirs do: It tries to figure things out. And it does so by being irreverent and respectful, reflective and investigative all at once.

Cohen is only 37, and this is his fifth book. (He wouldn’t have any trouble answering either of the questions posed to me yesterday!) He’s been on the staff of the New Yorker, the New York Observer, and Rolling Stone, where he’s now a contributing editor.

Cohen’s grandfather (an orphan) used to tell a story of how, in his last year of high school, he walked from Brooklyn to Albany on foot to contest the state’s denial of a diploma to him because he was a credit short. I liked this passage by Cohen:

“I’ve always found this story (Ben walks to Albany, pleads his case, gets his credits and the notion to become a lawyer) unbelievable. It’s the five-mile-walk-to-school-uphill-both-ways story that your grandfather tells to make you feel weak and lazy. In the Eisenstadt family, it’s the cornerstone of a religion. It was even told by the rabbi at Ben’s funeral. . . . I sometimes think a family is no more than a collection of such stories, a chronicle that locks you down like the safety bar that crosses your lap before the roller-coaster leaves the platform, without which you would fly away in the turns.”