May 30, 1954

Daphne Merkin (born May 30, 1954) is an American essayist; her essays are often published in The New Yorker magazine, and may concern fashion, or some biographical glimpses of urban life. She was born in New York City. According to a Tablet essay by Frances Brent:

She was born in 1954 into a large wealthy Orthodox family with an apartment on the East Side and a second home in Long Beach and then Atlantic Beach, N.Y. Her parents, German Jews, were refugees from Hitler’s Germany. Her father, a financier, was a philanthropist who generously spread money around Jewish charities while withholding at home. Her mother was emotionally complex but capricious with affection. She [Daphne] was hospitalized as a young child because of inconsolable crying; depression, about which she has written often, has hounded her ever since. She went to Barnard and later was mentored by Diana Trilling......The Merkin family has a public presence in New York City, and her older brother J. Ezra, a hedge-fund manager, has been in the news due to his connections with Bernard Madoff.

Merkin's latest book The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags (2014) includes this excerpt:

While Jewish law takes a fairly benign view of household pets and prohibits unnecessary cruelty to animals, European born Jews have historically enjoyed somewhat leery relations with dogs and cats. In my own family, gerbils were the main concession to my and my five siblings' wishes for a pet....My youngest brother was the most insistent in his wish for an animal playmate and eventually cajoled my mother into letting him have a snake. The snake required a diet of live mice, which only added to my brother's happiness, but the whole project was short-lived since it turned out that my mother's cherished housekeeper would not step foot in our apartment as long as a snake was on the premises.

....

All the same its easy to see the allure of furry tail-wagging little creatures and I'm not averse to joining the swelling ranks of urban dog owners some day. (As for cats I might as well admit I'm a confirmed ailurophobe.)

Brent's article includes this apercu:

After I told her I had gotten rid of a large number of poetry books in order to convince my husband to whittle down his library when we were moving to New York, she said, “Sounds very sacrificial.”