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Claire Kahane begins her riveting memoir with an old English proverb: “A cat has nine lives. For three he plays, for three he strays, and for the last three he stays.” It is an apt epigraph, for the
notable feminist psychoanalytic scholar has survived adventures and misadventures that would have been deadly for others.
Born in the Bronx in 1935 to uneducated Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, Kahane spent most of her adolescence and early adulthood rebelling against them and the cultural values of the age. “Bring me a boy,” her authoritarian father demanded of his wife. He remained an ominous figure in his daughter's life, rarely supporting any of her decisions. Nor was her mother nurturing, reminding that “men don't want damaged goods”—advice the daughter flaunted, sometimes at her peril.
For most of her adult life Kahane was constantly reinventing herself, beginning with her name. Born Clara Katz, she changed the spelling of her first name, and although she was calling herself “Kitty Katz,” a moniker that seemed appropriately sexy, seductive, and notorious, decades later, when she began to teach in the English Department at SUNY-Buffalo, she learned from a Hebrew scholar friend at Berkeley that Katz was not the German-Yiddish spelling of “cats,” as she had always assumed, but a diasporic acronym for Kahane Tzedek (Ka-tz), a linguistic marker to the high priest Aaron, the brother of Moses: Kohen, or Kahane, means priest, and Tzedek, most righteous.
Much of Kahane's early life involved play: playing at being a country singer in Queens, a beatnik in San Francisco in her twenties, a flaneur in Paris, a down-and-out traveler in Casablanca, even a graduate student at Berkeley—as much play as study. The play sometimes courted danger. On a boyfriend's dare, she shoplifted a belt from Klein's Department Store, an act she repeated several times, ending only when she had internalized her analyst's voice: “You are an adult; take responsibility for what you are doing” (