Kate Braverman's "Jewish money"

"Right from the beginning," Braverman says, "I had subversive instincts." Born in Philadelphia, she moved to Los Angeles with her Jewish parents and younger brother, Hank, in 1958, the year the Dodgers left Brooklyn. She was reared on welfare in "the stucco slums" of Los Angeles. No car, none of the glamour one associates with Los Angeles. Her father gambled; her mother had a nervous breakdown. Alienated, suffering a "squalid adolescence," she took refuge in books.

Because "Frantic Transmissions" is spotty on details, I ask Braverman what her father did when he worked. "He had cancer and so he was a professional invalid," she sighs. "We came to California originally because he was not expected to survive the winter back East. And lo and behold, he survived 25 years of Los Angeles."

At 15, she ran away to Berkeley, lived with a group of UC students, collected food stamps and wore Army surplus outfits. She went to Berkeley High, then UC Berkeley and returned to Los Angeles in 1971. L.A. scorched her soul but Braverman found connections in the alternative culture of the '70s and '80s. Her best-known novel, "Lithium for Medea," came from that period. At the Venice Poetry Workshop, her students included John Doe and Exene of the band X. She was a drug addict for 17 years, the first 14 with IV cocaine, then "a shorter but rather intense excursion into heroin addiction."

~~ Edward Guthmann, January 30, 2006