BOSTON (JTA) – Mamaev Medved often wrote about his native Maine in his essays and novels, which is celebrated for humor and sympathy for the folly of common people, including cast of Jewish mothers.
Medved was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his adopted city, which often played a starring role in his books, when he died of metastatic lung cancer on December 26.
Medved’s 2006 award-winning novel “How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life” was a national bestseller.
In addition to her seven novels and several short stories, she was a widely published book critic and essayist, whose work has appeared in the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and Gourmet Magazine.
Her books, including “Men and Their Mothers,” often include references to Jewish characters, Jewish culture, and humor that reflect her Jewish roots.
“Her Jewish identity was an important part of her artistic puzzle,” her son Daniel Medved told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
She said that her humor was influenced by the echoes of her Jewish Rakontur aunts, uncles and cousins.
“She was more of a listener, a listener, always looking for a story. Her novels contained a lot of laughter and funny prophecies, many of which were about overcoming adversity,” said her son.
Mamaev Stern, who was named after two grandmothers, Mamie and Eva, grew up in Bangor, Maine, in a Jewish community in a city dominated by Catholics and Protestants in the 1940s and 1950s. Her great-grandfather was Bangor’s first rabbi, but her mother shied away from Jewish upbringing and aspired to fit in with her Christian neighbors. Her father grew up in a kosher household.
Medved went to Hebrew school and celebrated Jewish holidays at the homes of his aunts, uncles, and cousins, but admitted that he felt conflicted about his Jewish upbringing
“I lived a bifurcated life,” he wrote in an essay published in 2007 in the anthology, “How to Spell Chanukah…and Other Holiday Dilemmas,” edited by Emily Franklin. “Who was I? Did I celebrate Chanukah or Christmas? Did I like Santa… or the Bible stories of Moses and Rachel?”
Medved graduated from Simmons College and taught fiction for many years at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. In 1979, she met fellow writer Elinor Lippmann in an adult education writing class at Brandeis University taught by critic and editor Arthur Edelstein.
“It wasn’t that long ago, when we were friends,” Lippman told JTA, recalling that they were the only two in the class who were writing in a style considered funny.
For 40 years, the pair were each other’s literary sounding boards, “up to the point where everything I wrote and every single thing she wrote, we carried it over to each other—the chapters, the essays, the book reviews, everything. ,” said Lippman, author of bestsellers including “The Inn at Lake Divine” and “Good Ridge.”
“Her characters are self-effacing. Wisdom never comes from high self-esteem. It comes from her apologetic approach to life. I think it’s Jewish,” Lippman said. “She grew up in Maine. It’s the Jewish wisdom of New England that has a touch of its own.”
While Medved entertained his readers with wit and a satisfying ending, the work was serious business, he told the Boston Globe.
“I want to make a plug for comic fiction. I think people who write funny are dismissed as light. I say that’s not true. We deal with things that everyone else deals with.” But from a domestic perspective, with domestic relationships stands for bigger things.”
Medved, whose husband Howard died in 2019, has two sons, a sister and four grandchildren.