“Family Matters” is a generations long reckoning with family myth, loss and transformation from the end of the Civil War into the 1970s, showing how family suffering metamorphosized into comedy on an abiding public, cultural scale in the original The Addams Family” television series of 1964-1966 created by the author's father, David Levy, from the original Charles “Addams New Yorker cartoons. It is also the story of how the author's parents though drawn from widely divergent backgrounds strove to realize the American Dream. Levy's ancestors derived from Jewish Eastern Europe, Lucile Wilds' from Germany and Anglo-Welsh aristocracy. The breakdown of that effort both as a slow ebbing and with an abrupt jolt provides the narrative drive and climax of “Family Matters”.
“Family Matters” traces the links between private and public, myth and fact, reality and the transformations we all make to understand ourselves and the ideals we raise from our warring strands of inheritance and experience.
