The Gate: A Memoir of Love and Reflection

By Riane Eisler

From the author of the best-selling The Chalice and the Blade...

The Gate takes us from a narrow escape from the Holocaust in Nazi Europe, first to pre-Castro Cuba with its throbbing sexuality and decadence, and then the 1950s United States pre-civil rights movement. It tells the mesmerizing story of a clever child becoming her own woman. When Riane Eisler fled her native Vienna with her parents in 1939, the young Jewish refugee left behind an affluent and cosmopolitan life. A totally different world awaited her in Havana. As she grows older, she develops a secret life, becoming involved with a sexy and fiery Marxist revolutionary. As her family regains wealth and prestige, the daughter better understands her parents, their complicated relationship, and her own place in the world.

This lyrical, lovely work, reminiscent of Marguerite Duras' The Lover, is much more than a memoir. It is a work of art that will call each reader to examine the birth of consciousness and soul in themselves and that, for a brief moment, will remind each of us that technology and consumerism, as fine as they might be, are not the fundamental needs of the human soul.

The Gate works on many levels - from scintillating romance to the psychological profile of an influential social thinker. By reading The Gate, the many readers of The Chalice and the Blade and Sacred Pleasure will learn for the first time the very personal events in Riane Eisler's life that lead her to the courageous and portentous insights about human relationships and social history later documented in her exhaustive research on both pre- and contemporary civilizations.

Never before has a noted thinker revealed the inner psychological drama of her own awakening so directly related to the development of her groundbreaking creation of social theory, embodied in her work of the last twenty years in creating the partnership model. It will be clear to historians how the events in Ms. Eisler's life awakened her to social action and discomfort with prejudice, violence and inequality. The Gate shows the common thread of injustice and man's inhumanity to man -ranging from the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, to the sexual and economic exploitation so rampant in Cuba, to the horrors of racism and justice in the United States itself. But above all, it is a book that will move every reader with its hope, faith, and love.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0595001858
• ISBN13: 9780595001859
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.4" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Interesting reading

Although I found The Gate not as interesting as the other books written by R. Eisler I enjoyed it for her first hand descriptions of life in Cuba during the 30s. Considering she was very young when she arrived in the island with her parents after leaving a very different life in Europe, her observations are defined by her especial situation, background and short life experience.

The Unknown Community: Jewish Refugees in Cuba

With the turn of each page I began to realize that this was more than a semi-autobiographical work by one of the most well-regarded systems theorists of our era. Riane Eisler, the internationally acclaimed author of The Chalice and The Blade, Sacred Pleasure, Tomorrow's Children and numerous works on the women's legal rights, has brought to the attention of her audience an area of Jewish twentieth century history previously unknown to many....the role that pre-Castro Cuba played as a haven to thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in the late 1930's.The Gate provides the reader with insights from a young girl's perspective, growing up with a culture, language, and socio-economic background significantly different than anything she or her family had experienced before. The reader perches on a young Eisler's shoulder as she explores the sights, scents and sounds of a tropical paradise, as she encounters her first love affair, and how she grows to understand the relationship and role her parents play in her life.For readers familar with Eisler's concepts of partnership and dominator models of relationships, it is quickly apparent the role that her Cuban upbringing, her father, and the young idealistic revolutionaries she found herself surrounded by played in her research of these concepts in later years. My one regret with this book is that Eisler does not continue to enchant the reader with the changes to come in her early adulthood as she enters the United States, witnesses the struggles her family must undergo to "start over" yet again, and as she begins her own exploration and growth as a lawyer and young mother. We get a mere taste of what is to come, instead of the full serving the reader begs for!