The Things We Do for Love: Stories of My Life

Ruhama Veltfort was a young Barnard graduate living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan when she gave up her newborn son for adoption. Thirty-one years later, she discovered that he was living only five blocks away from her home in San Francisco's Mission District. With tenderness and wry humor, these fourteen well-observed stories trace the roots of that cycle of relinquishment and reunion, offering an intimate perspective on the social transformations of the mid-to-late twentieth century. Lovers, husbands, children and a "rag-tag band of seekers and screwballs" wind their way through this vivid and even-handed memoir of a Bohemian "red-diaper" childhood in 1950's California, a rebellious coming-of-age in the earliest days of the Grateful Dead and an Ivy League education gone sour. Universal themes of idealism, betrayal and redemption weave through a moving account of the author's adventures in political activism and the human potential movement to culminate in a maturity graced by family, friends and an eclectic spirituality.