The Leopard Hat: A Daughter's Story

Valerie Steiker’s Belgian Jewish mother, Gisèle—who, as a child in Antwerp, was hidden from the Nazis—wasn’t a typical American mom. She spoke with throaty Belgian Rs and wore only high heels. Before her marriage, she had studied acting with Lee Strasburg and been a model in Mexico. With her vitality and elegance, she created a joyous childhood for Valerie and her sister. Together they tangoed through their vibrant Manhattan apartment, took in great art, and shared “women’s hidden secrets.” Gisèle’s premature death left Valerie (at the time a junior at Harvard) unmoored, but in grieving and in finding her own path to womanhood, Valerie would ultimately grow to understand Gisèle more profoundly than she ever had as a child. Beautifully evocative of a glamourous and now-vanished world, The Leopard Hat is an extraordinary memoir about the warm and indelible bond between mother and daughter.

In this tender loving memoir, Valerie Steiker evokes a magical childhood on the Upper East side of New York with a woman whose own losses led her to delight in family, beauty and life itself.

Valerie Steiker’s Belgian Jewish mother, Gisèle—who, as a child in Antwerp, was hidden from the Nazis—wasn’t a typical American mom. She spoke with throaty Belgian Rs and wore only high heels. Before her marriage, she had studied acting with Lee Strasburg and been a model in Mexico. With her vitality and elegance, she created a joyous childhood for Valerie and her sister. Together they tangoed through their vibrant Manhattan apartment, took in great art, and shared “women’s hidden secrets.” Gisèle’s premature death left Valerie (at the time a junior at Harvard) unmoored, but in grieving and in finding her own path to womanhood, Valerie would ultimately grow to understand Gisèle more profoundly than she ever had as a child. Beautifully evocative of a glamourous and now-vanished world, The Leopard Hat is an extraordinary memoir about the warm and indelible bond between mother and daughter.

Publishers Weekly

"You'll get to know your mother more as you go through the different phases of your life," a wise friend consoled Steiker, a former New Yorker writer and ArtForum editor, who'd lost her mother before they could connect "woman to woman." In this finely etched memoir, Steiker relives her childhood the family apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the Parisian escapes with her mother, the family holidays in India and Nepal in delicious, Proustian detail. The simplest objects (e.g., a favorite dress, an ugly pepper mill, a long-lost Art Deco ring) evoke strong memories; Steiker's mother had a "mania for tchotchkes." Habits and rituals speak, too: her mother's quaint English ("will wonders never seize!"), Shabbat candle-lighting and the family shaking hands with each other before starting every trip abroad. Steiker's "show don't tell" style lets detail make her point, e.g., when her family is at a seaside cafe in Belgium, everyone's playing cards, the waffles are piled high with strawberries and whipped cream and yet many "players have blue numbers on their arms. No one speaks of it." Early in the narrative, Steiker studies a photo her mother took of her and aches for "the sensation, lost forever now, of standing and dreaming and being me before my mother's eyes." This rich, elegantly understated chronicle brings back that very feeling for Steiker and for her readers. Agent, Tina Bennett. (May 3) Forecast: Well-timed for Mother's Day, this memoir speaks to literary readers and those interested in Jewish culture. It should do especially well in New York. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Valerie Steiker’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Vogue, ARTnews, The Forward, and The New York Times Book Review. A senior editor at Vogue, she lives in Manhattan.