Our Names Do Not Appear: A Memoir Paperback – May 30, 2023

From the very first page this book sucked me in, with an animated description of a mother caring for her seriously ill son, then rushing him to the emergency room..Her son’s hospitalization brings up the trauma of losing her five-year old brother Joey many years previously. After her son’s recovery, the author searches obsessively for information about Joey, the brother she barely knew. With persistence, imagination, and dedication, she learns more and more about how Joey lived and died. Based on this, in the second half of the book, she reenacts what happened.This book is a wonderful example of how trauma can linger for years and suddenly spring up unexpectedly. It shows how exploring past trauma can be cathartic and can also help others work through their childhood traumas. Highly recommended. A fascinating read.

Lev׳s courageous and deeply moving exploration of family secrets and the role they played in the coming of age of a deeply insightful and lyrical author moved me to tears.I highly recommend reading this combination memoir and fictionalized autobiography.Judy captures perfectly the environments of growing up in an upwardly mobile middle-class Shaker Heights family and then in an adopted family of new ‘Anglo’ immigrants in Jerusalem.Highly recommended!

Through investigation, memoir and fantasy, Judy brings the reader into her quest to discover, understand and “name” her past, and so, to break its hold on her. Judy’s light touch makes Our Names Do Not Appear a tender story that encouraged me to reflect on my own silences and secrets, to forgive, and to reclaim my own voice in the present. A beautiful must-read!

We are all gatekeepers of untidy gardens, untended patches of hurt, confusion, and dissonance rampant with weeds that purposefully impede our growth. In her memoir, Our Names Do Not Appear, Judy Lev bravely shares her journey through the looking glass to her early childhood experiences and remakes the tragedy and emotional vacuum surrounding the death of her baby brother, Joey. Judy draws us straight into 1950s Shaker Heights where she searches for the truth about Joey's short life. Her discoveries boomerang decades forward into Judy's life as a wife and mother. I admire Judy's honest writing about the perpetual effect of grief.

An exquisitely told story that will grab you from the start and never let you go.

I couldn’t put this book down! The combination of Lev’s witty writing, a deep look into trauma and how we hold grief within us, the juxtaposition of memoir and fictional memoir - not an easy thing to pull off – but Lev has done so by seamlessly by weaving imagination and fact - takes the reader deep inside the experience of loss against the backdrop of mid-western American culture and the holiness of the city of Jerusalem. I’m going to read it all over again.

The book shows the power of pain that is ignored. Like s psychological thriller you learn how peeling away resistance to grief results in a soul becoming stronger with a new level of self-awareness, and how we are often hurt by people who are trying to protect us. The book is a must for anyone who has suffered from the trauma of family secrets.

This is a compelling, well written, historically accurate window into the complex intergenerational family's continuing reactions to the tragedy of the premature birth, short life and somewhat mysterious death, of a severely disabled child.