Biography
Kim Chernin was born on May 7, 1940, in the Bronx, New York. Her parents, Rose Chernin and Paul Kusnitz, were Russian-born Jewish immigrants who were Marxist and Communist Party organizers for much of their lives. Chernin's childhood was influenced by the death of her older sister, Nina, to Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Shortly after Nina's death, the Chernin family relocated to Los Angeles to be near relatives. Her mother resumed full-time work as a party organizer and in 1951 made national headline news when she was arrested for "advocating the overthrow of the government." Rose Chernin was later called before the House Un-American Activities Committee for her work as a party organizer. The U.S. government tried unsuccessfully to denaturalize her and deprive her of citizenship for such activities.
Kim Chernin was active as an organizer of the LYL Labor Youth League and, upon graduation from high school, traveling to Moscow for the Seventh World Festival of Youth and Students. In her memoir, In My Mother's House, Chernin writes:
| “ | Like most adolescents, I had begun to lead a divided life. At home I involved myself in politics, made my little speeches, and was active in the Labor Youth League. I still sold the People's World on Sunday afternoons with my father in the neighborhood, and on Sunday nights I prepared lectures on Marxism for my Marxist study club. But in my school life I was a wild kid, who stayed out too late and wandered about on the streets with other kids, cruising from party to party. | ” |
Chernin moved to Berkeley to attend the University of California, Berkeley and married David Netboy at the age of 18. In 1963, her only child, Larissa, was born while she was studying at Trinity College, Dublin. She divorced seven years later, subsequently also marrying and divorcing Robert Cantor, before settling into a long-term relationship with her current partner Renate Stendhal, with whom she co-wrote Sex and Other Sacred Games and Cecilia Bartoli: The Passion of Song. She currently lives in Point Reyes, California, where she writes and works as a psychotherapist. She was a guest instructor at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. She has been featured on radio, including National Public Radio.
Read more about this topic: Kim Chernin
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)