Fall 1996
WHEN I FIRST STARTED ASKING MY FATHER QUESTIONS about my grandparents, I knew very little about them. What I knew mostly had to do with their religiousness, particularly that of my grandmother, of which much was made by my father. “One of the sages of the region once said to my beloved late mother,” he would remark in his orotund Hungarian, an indulgent smile on his face, “'Dear lady, just send me any of your throw-away dishs, the ones you think traif They'll certainly be kosher enough for me!'"
My father would add with a small chuckle, “That was just his way of making a little joke, because of the lengths to which your grandmother Ilonka carried the dietary laws. She didn't just have separate dishes and pots and pans for meat and dairy, she had two completely separate kitchens! She worried, you see, that if she prepared fleishig and milchig foods at the same time, in one kitchen, they might mingle to make an unkosher cloud." And he would laugh a sad laugh.
I grew up eating pork cracklings, blood sausage and head cheese first in Budapest, then in Montreal, where my father purchased these delectables at Hoffner’s, a Hungarian delicatessen on the Main. Despite all that had happened to him-the loss of parents, brothers, his first wife and their little daughter-he continued to believe in God, but couldn't believe it made any difference to Him what we put in our bellies. At night he sliced rye bread for the sandwiches he would take to work and I to school the following day. He spread butter on the slices, then filled his slabs with cream cheese and mine with ham.
“Ilushka is entirely old enough to make her own sandwiches,” my mother observed tartly, watching him as she nibbled on a Cadbury's chocolate finger while waiting for the kettle to boil. "Whoever heard of a father making sandwiches for a girl her age? You're always coddling her, more like her grandmother than a father!"
I was Ilushka, at eighteen already in my third year at McGill, precocious in school, lazy in the kitchen-wafting back to my room quickly to avoid being implicated in these discussions. My father's mild reply trailed softly behind me. “She works too hard ... I don't mind making two sets of sandwiches, it's no more trouble than one.”
“You work too hard," my mother retorted, taking her tea down to the basement TV-room. My father gave a small sigh, but continued methodically with his evening chores. He tore off two baggies from the boxed roll on the counter and stuffed the sandwiches into them . Shuffling over to the pantry for a couple of apples (he had just turned sixty and it was beginning to show), he bent stiff-kneed to choose from a stack of used brown bags. As he attended to his roster of self-imposed tasks, you would never have suspected that he had grown up on a large estate where cooks, parlour maids, nightwatchmen, coachmen and some hundred farm labourers stood at his beck and call. In the east Montreal suburb of Ville d'Anjou, he waited on the three of us, my mother, my sister and me, with understated devotion. He woke at dawn, whispering the prescribed prayers in reflexive Hebrew as he set the family breakfast table. When he emerged from the shower, he knocked on my door, then bent over me in bed, his hand on my shoulder to shake me awake. A weather warning, more than likely, in winter: “Wear your snuggies, it’s cold today."
Across the street a half hour later, we stood waiting together for the suburban bus to rumble us down to Sherbrooke East and connect us to the greater Montreal transport system. At seven in the morning in winter, it was frigid. The wind stung my bare thighs beneath my skirt, for on principle I hadn't put on the eminently sensible wool snuggies that would have shielded the expanse of skin left bare between panties and nylons. We sat side by side on the three buses it took in those days-the Metro was still a year from opening-to get from east Montreal to downtown. While I reviewed my lecture notes and he worked his way through the Gazette, small shopping centres, a couple of red brick hospitals, the Aiello grave- stone plant, and the municipal golf course could vaguely be discerned through patches of white-frosted glass thawed by an ungloved palm. In fits and starts we laboured through morning traffic towards the centre of town, changing from the 185 to the number 4 at the Botanical Gardens. A stop before St. Laurent and Sherbrooke, my father folded up his paper and zipped it away in his brown duffle bag. He grazed my cheek with a kiss that smelled of Williams Lectric Shave; from the sidewalk, he turned to wave before trudging off, a short, bulky man, muffled in a dark three- quarter-length coat, his visored cap with the furred earflaps just allowing a glimpse of square glasses and a jutting nose.
There were four or five more stops to go before University, but I also shut my notebook and zipped up my briefcase.
I was a studious girl, with a scholar’s respect for research. As methodical as my father going about his evening chores, I had plotted out the bibliography for my honours thesis and knew just which spool of microfilmed colonial newspaper I ought to unreel that morning at the Redpath Library. What I didn't know was whether I would give in to the temptation of veering away from the conservative theories of Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Hutchinson of eighteenth century Massachusetts. Whether in fact I would address the appropriate reel of the Boston Evening-Post waiting for me on interlibrary loan, or head yet again to the section of the sociology stacks devoted to mixed marriage.
My boyfriend and I had begun to date three years earlier in high school, a babes-in-the-wood relationship that showed no signs of going away. My parents were hung up on his family: they were nice people, but not Jewish. Still, they muted their objections out of a hopeful belief that, if allowed to run its course, the romance would die quietly.
To me and my boyfriend, differences in background and religion till now had seemed entirely irrelevant. What mattered was our shared love for Portrait of the Artist, and Juliet of the Spirits, and "The Times They Are a-Changin'." What mattered most was the power we wielded over each other with a finger tip on a nape, or a tongue in an ear.
In the sociology stacks devoted to mixed marriage to which I succumbed every day that winter I found volume after volume of lugubrious case studies. The experts didn't hold with mixed marriage. They cautioned that two religions in one family were a recipe for, if not disaster exactly, vicious power struggle for spouses and debilitating identity crises for their children.
The experts were slightly more sanguine about intermarriage. A slim chance for the success of such unions rested on the willingness of one of the partners to give up her faith, thereby ensuring family harmony and stability. “Her," because in all the examples trotted out, it appeared to be the woman who converted.
The women who opted for this course were somehow all Christians. It seemed unheard of in these North American studies published in the 1950s to find either a Jewish female prepared to marry out of her faith, or a Gentile man disposed to become a Jew.
I gave myself over daily to the idea of converting to Christianity. Having gone to schools in Montreal's east end where I was invariably the only Jew, I could belt out “Onward Christian Soldiers” with the best, adored “Silent Night" and was far more familiar with the Lord's Prayer than with any Hebrew liturgy.
Sociology books continued to pile up at my work station in a deserted comer of the stacks and the microfilm reader went unclaimed as I wrestled with myself.
The weight of family precedent as much as personal inclination tilted the scales towards my conversion. My aunt and uncle had both “turned out," as we put it in Hungarian, when they arrived in Montreal a few years before us. In heated arguments with my parents, they maintained that conversion was a matter of safety and logic for survivors who had truly learned the lessons of the Holocaust. It was a delusion, they said, to believe that the recent past might not repeat itself. The seeds of Hitlerism might sprout again one day. Their children weren't going to be fodder for another Auschwitz.
And so my aunt and uncle, both originally reared in Jewish orthodoxy, had settled in east end Montreal among a sea of French Catholics to raise a Christian family.
It was to be near them that we, too, had struck root in Ville d'Anjou. My parents remained impervious to my uncle's arguments, but the cord of family love-while strained by this fundamental difference-still bound us together.
We remained Jewish, but my aunt’s Christian habits were contagious. Or perhaps it was the neighbourly surround of Italians and French and Poles and assorted WASPS in the neat bungalows, split-levels and duplexes of this new suburb that infected my parents.
At the beginning of December, taking their cue from our neighbours, my parents strung blinking lights in our front windows. They mounted a Christmas tree in the living room, bought Christmas cake, a turkey, the works.
When in Rome, my father implied, although he never said so. What he did say, out of the blue, one morning on the bus, as if he could read my mind, even though I had not said a word to him, nor to anyone else, not even to my boyfriend, about what was eating at me: what he did say in Hungarian, zippering away his newspaper a stop earlier than usual, was, “I left Hungary so as you and your sister could marry Jewish men when the time came. There were no Jews left to pick and choose from at home. But Christians you could have had galore there, too."
All sorts of hot retorts rose to my lips, but I didn't say anything. I averted my face when he bent to kiss me as he got off.
At the library that morning, I looked at the mound of sociology texts on my desk with distaste. Flipping pages, I felt repelled by the smell of mold, of the reek of stale received wisdom which at the same moment I was also certain held the key to my happiness. With the shove of one finger, I could topple that mountain of knowledge, then stomp on it on the floor.
Instead I lay my head on the desk, the stack of books a pillow, and squeezed my eyes shut against tears that were stronger than my will.
And against my pressed eyelids all that-in answer to my questions about his parents-my father had recently told me of my grandparents began to unspool like a movie.
When she had married, Grandmother Ilonka had not shaved off her hair in the manner of the ultra-orthodox. My grandfather had been overjoyed to discover this on their wedding night, for his own mother and sisters were all bald beneath the wigs they wore in public. But then, as she became progressively more and more religious, Ilonka had a change of heart and threatened to take the razor to her hair. My grandfather first reasoned with her and, when that failed, begged her to change her mind.
In the end, she heeded him. She didn't shave her hair after all, but designed a special headdress, a bit like a wimple that came down low over her forehead and hid every scrap of hair on her scalp. That's how she appears in the albums in her later years, a moon-faced Jewish matron in the guise of a nun.
Her household was a byword for hospitality and for abundance. But while she pressed food on everyone else, she herself was an ascetic, eating sparingly. During World War I, when four of her brothers were in the army, she fasted two days a week as a prayer offering for their welfare.
On the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, the feast of fasts, when it is customary to wear white to signify a state of purity, my grandmother would put on a white silk kimono richly embroidered in white thread. On her head she wore her trademark wimple low on her brow but this garment, too, was fashioned of silk for the holiday rather than the usual batiste. She pulled on white stockings and white slippers. During Yom Kippur prayers, she draped her shoulders with an additional white-fringed shawl similar to the prayershawl worn by men.
These ceremonial clothes she intended one day to wear before her Maker as her shroud.
"It's a mitzvah, a good deed, to eat heartily before Yom Kippur,” my grandfather, himself dressed in an impeccable dark suit, urged the family gathered around the table.
It groaned with a variety of rich food-cracklings and liver, roast goose, tomato sauce-all guaranteed to bring on enormous thirst the next day, when not even a sip of water was allowed to cross one’s lips.
When the meal had been cleared away, the women lit candles in memory of the dead, before kindling the holiday candles. And then good wishes for an easy fast were exchanged before men and women adjourned separately to pray to be inscribed that year, as all years, in the book of life.
When the German army occupied Hungary in March 1944, Hungarian Jews, until then relatively sheltered compared to the others under German hegemony, received their death sentence. A month later, my grandparents were taken by force from the family estate to a hastily-erected ghetto in a nearby town.
They spent slightly over a month there squeezed into a squalid attic room with the rest of their relatives. The howling of those being tortured to reveal the whereabouts of their valuables punctuated the night. In the morning, bloodied men slunk back to their quarters. After a couple of weeks, food ran out. Conditions were so deplorable, a couple of Ilonka's cousins committed suicide.
But to dispel rumours in Budapest that the Jews in the countryside were being badly treated, the State Secretary for Jewish Affairs embarked on a public relations tour of the ghettos. That is how the virulent Jew-hater László Endre came to face off with my grandmother.
Ever since the beginning of the German occupation, Ilonka had been writing upbeat bulletins to my father who was away from home, a conscript in forced labour. Her letters spoke of her absolute conviction that God would yet reunite them in this life. After the war, a surviving cousin would tell my father that, in the ghetto and on the train to Auschwitz, his mother's optimism had bolstered the faith of all those around her.
This ostensible optimist had nevertheless packed in her baggage allowance of life's necessities the outfit of white clothing she wore every year on Yom Kippur. The outfit that she had destined for her shroud.
László Endre, Eichmann's Hungarian henchman, the embodiment of evil and terror for every Jew in the country, chose to give minute inspection to the attic that housed my grandparents. Flanked by gendarmes, he pointed to this and that item, demanding explanation and justification. Rifling through Ilonka's burlap sack, he yanked out first the white kimono, then the heavily fringed white shawl that she always wore on the Day of Days.
“And what are those things?"
The short, dumpy old woman drew back her shoulders.
“Those are clothes to die in.”
In the Redpath Library, I dried my eyes. I hauled the sociology texts away to be reshelved and determined to put thoughts of the Hungarian past behind me. There were safer histories one could study if one had a taste for history: Loyalism in North America, for instance, contained in boxed microfilm, tame and sane. I wrote my thesis and graduated with distinction.
Two years later I married my boyfriend. Bemused by my adamancy that he change his faith, he turned a token convert. But, in the event, it was I who became a Jew.
Little by little I began to take after my grandmother. No, I didn't shave my head or wear a wimple, but, almost without noticing, eccentricities began overtaking me in the kitchen. First pork got pitched, then shellfish, as I gradually reconstructed my kitchen into a semblance of kosher.
Not because I believe, any more than my father did, that God cares a jot whether we butter our bread or not when we eat roast beef. But today when I set my table for a holiday repast, I like to pretend that the grandparents I never had the chance to know preside over it in spirit. And that perhaps in some small comer of eternity, my grandmother knows that what mattered so much to her is not irrelevant to me.
"The Unworn Shroud"
This essay was published in
Fall 1996
Award
1996 - Finalist, Tilden Prize
Fall 1990
A CHICKEN SIMMERS IN JULlA'S SOUP POT, THE FIRST KOSHER CHICKEN SHE HAS EVER COOKED, THOUGH SHE IS NOT NEW TO COOKING. JULIA, HER EYES ON THE CLOCK, HER MIND ELSEWHERE, LIFTS LIDS OFF POTS CROWDING THE STOVE. VAPORS OF HONEY ED CARROTS AND TOMATO SAUCE AND PARSLEYED POTATOES RISE IN HER FACE. SHE RE-COVERS THE POTS, GLANCES AT HER WRISTWATCH. 4:25: DID SHE REMIND Rob this morning that candlelighting was at 5:56? They ought to be sitting down in five minutes if they're to do justice to the five-course holiday meal she's prepared. Perhaps she forgot to mention candlelighting altogether. She's been so careful to avoid a repeat of last year's Yom Kippur battle with Rob that she may not have said anything at all.
Julia peers inside the soup pot, skimming golden islets of fat from the bubbling brew. She spears a drumstick with a knife. The meat flakes off easily. She blows on the morsel at the tip of the knife, pops it in her mouth. It tastes like - chicken. What had she expected? And what had possessed her, in the car yesterday, to swerve to the side of the road so abruptly that the cab behind her nearly hit her? She had certainly passed KOVACS'S KOSHER ("Marinated Spare Ribs", "B-B-Q Chickens") hundreds of times before without the impulse to stop.
Inside the shop, she pretended not to understand as Mr. and Mrs. Kovacs exchanged bursts of rapid Hungarian with each other. "Another one that gets religion before Yom Kippur, a once-a-year Jew!" said the butcher.
"That makes seven in a row I've never seen before?" Mrs. Kovacs made change. "Chag sameach," she smiled at Julia, baring a gold crown.
"Koszonom szepen", said Julia, in her best Hungarian. Thank you.
The doorbell rings and Julia feels relief suffuse through her. Rob is home in time. There will be no repeat of last year's histrionics, of a drama she well recalls though still does not fully understand:
"But what difference does it make if we eat five minutes later?" Rob, harried yet insouciant, had arrived at the last minute when Julia stood already poised by her grandmother's silver candlesticks. The table had been cleared of food. Rob had tried to sound reasonable through the undercurrent of irritation in his voice. "How could you not hold dinner for me? We can fast five minutes longer tomorrow. For God's sake, Julia, you never used to care about any of this stuff before!"
Julia, in her late thirties, cries as easily as when she was small. The tears trickled down her face as she lit the holiday candles. Not because of Rob's anger, but because of the very justness of his words. She had certainly never cared about this stuff before. It had always been her father's role to rush her mother, to rush all of them through the meal before Kol Nidre. Dressed in his best suit, his eyes blinking nervously behind his glasses, he used to eye his wristwatch while urging them to hurry. "Nine gulps of water at the end of the meal," he had intoned at the head of the table. "Nine gulps to finish with and you won't be thirsty tomorrow.'
Daddy, Daddy.
Around the table in Julia's dining room the remnants of the feast have been cleared away. She stands behind the candles, her cheeks catching their glow, eyes suddenly radiant because Rob is home on time, has buried last year's hatchet, is resolved to please (humor?) her. Rob faces Julia; their children and her mother flank the table between them. On the nearby buffet spread with an embroidered runner, the yahrzeit candles in their metal encasements occasionally sputter. Rob, his brown head bare, stumbles hurriedly over the kiddush.
Yahrzeit candles. Julia remembers.
Thirty years ago, the end of the '50s. Their first year in Montreal, their first Yom Kippur in a strange land. She was eight. At the foot of the velveteen sofa a small table covered with a richly embroidered cloth. On it, six fat, metal-encased sputtering candles casting weird patterns on the ceiling, permeating the room with the smell of wax.
Julia, the child, wakes with a start, staring in disoriented detachment at the flickering patterns in the half-light. Her mouth is dry, sour.
From the other side of the wall, a sound she can't decode. From her parents' room. A muffled repetitive noise, like a series of stifled, cut-off sneezes.
Her soles cling clammy to the rose-patternd linoleum as she pushes the door to their room open. The room fully lit. Like an owl she blinks in the painful brightness, trying to make sense of the image. On the far side of the bed, her father's bulky form doubled over - source of the muffled sobs. Her view now obscured. Mummy with dishevelled hair, in white nightie, bending over Julia, finger on her lips. Easing her out of the room.
"It's all right," Mummy whispers. "Go back to bed, Julia. He does this every year. Every Kol Nidre evening. Mourning his dead .... All his dead from the War. Once a year he does this. It has nothing to do with you."
Her father's tears for his dead: mother, father, brothers - all swallowed by Auschwitz. Aunts, uncles, cousins, college chums. A first wife whose picture hangs in the living room over the velveteen sofa. A little girl - her sister - who would be ten years older than Julia had she lived.
"It has nothing to do with you."
But her father had wept for the living as well. He had wept for Julia when she and Rob announced their engagement in 1967. Not the primordial sobs that had roused her on Kol Nidre night, just a misting of his glasses as in a fine drizzle. He had left the room in a hurry.
The summer of '67. Mad euphoria after the Six Day War. Summer of Expo. Mini skirts and clogs and oversized sunglasses. A queue snaking in front of the Israeli pavilion. Her hand in Rob's. The midday sun beating down. The shrill scream of seagulls. The odor of steamies and vinegar and fries.
"Tears: A Yom Kippur Story"
This short story was published in
Fall 1990
August 13, 2011
“Today, one in eight Bulgarians lives abroad, and I have seen countless parents (my own included) encourage their children to leave, to seek chances away from home, and I’ve seen Bulgarians change their names, abandon their language, take on new beliefs, new ideologies and identities, forget where they came from,” writes Miroslav Penkov in a recent blog post, flagging the publication of his debut collection of stories.
The reader will be forgiven for not recognizing the name of the 28 year-old Bulgarian-American writer, or for being ignorant of the plight of Bulgarians at home or abroad. East of the West may do a lot to change that because of its rich and fascinating subject matter and its author’s unmistakably large talent.
Grace of the Internet, you can Google Penkov and within seconds access the blog in which he sums up 1500 years of the history that feeds his stories. But you don’t need to bone up on facts, because--pace the subtitle (A Country in Stories)—East of the West is about unforgettable characters in memorable situations. You are, in short, in the hands of a novice master testing his skills and the boundaries of his craft. Think of a young Alice Munro crossing paths with David Bezmozgis and Jonathan Safran Foer. In Bulgaria.
The stories run the gamut from traditional slice-of-life realism, to absurdist and nihilistic satire, to mythic and poetic meditation. All but one is recounted by a varius first person narrators. In Makedonija, this is a 71-year-old man in an old age home, consumed by jealousy of his wife’s long-ago lover, whose letters from a field of battle in 1905 the narrator stumbles upon by accident. In 21 tight pages Penkov tells the story of five generations against the backdrop of wars and revolutions that foreshadow the Balkan troubles of our own times.
In The Letter, the point of view is that of 16-year-old Maria, abandoned at birth by her mother with her twin Magda, in an orphanage. There Magda is beaten into a state of brain damage by a teacher, while Maria is adopted by a grandmother, who grooms her in the arts of subterfuge and theft. Amoral and venal though Maria is, when it comes to Magda, she proves herself capable of a fierce, if compromised integrity.
The most ambitious of the stories, Devshirmeh (“blood tribute”), blends the story of Mihail, a deadbeat Bulgarian immigrant to America, with that of a mythical ancestor whose life encompassed a complex Turkish/Slav/Moslem/Christian cultural heritage. Mihail’s saga rings true in all its often bizarre and exaggerated details of a soured immigrant dream, from the emergency surgery that lands him in $25,000 debt, to the benefactor that steals his wife, to his unfaltering—if often irresponsible—love for his little girl, Elli. The fairy tale Mihail recounts Elli symbolizes the conflict warring within the heart of anyone leaving one world for another: how to make a good life in the new country while holding on to the essence of the one abandoned.
East of the West: A Country in Stories
by Miroslav Penkov
Review published in
August 13, 2011
January 30, 2004
In the fecund imagination of Toronto writer Lilian Nattel only a flimsy veil separates the world of the living and that of the dead. Her new novel, The Singing Fire, is peopled not only by characters of flesh and blood but also by protective ghosts attempting to save mortals from themselves and even interceding on their behalf with the power on high. Yes, Nattel’s fictional firmament is presided over by a Court of Heaven and a God who writes in a golden book. Kabbalistic lore gets a hearing too. “Tradition says that in the beginning there was only God. Then came the tzim-tzum. The Holy One withdrew to make space for creation, though it left him lonely and it left us lonely, separated from each other. The feminine aspect of God didn’t go, but stayed with us in our exile, and She, the divine presence among living beings, is called the Shekhina. She sings and cries and comforts us with her broken wings as she is also limited by the world of imperfect stuff.”
Despite its otherworldly dimensions, compared to Nattel’s highly acclaimed first novel The River Midnight, The Singing Fire is bracingly realistic. For one thing it’s firmly rooted in actual places. The River Midnight was set in an imaginary Polish shtetl where magical events—humans turning themselves into frogs then back again, cameo appearances by the Angel of Death—were commonplace. A more controlled and mature work than its predecessor, The Singing Fire takes place primarily in the East End of London in the last quarter of the 19th century.
In the era of Jack the Ripper, the city’s underworld and its Jewish ghetto were adjacent to one another. A five-minute walk divided the brothels, gaming houses, and crime-infested pubs of Dorset Street from the synagogues, stalls, and tailors’ workshops of Petticoat Lane. “The two kinds of streets were right next to each other, like the world of the living and the world of the dead, but you couldn’t cross over from one to the other.”
The Singing Fire is the story of Nehama Korzen, who makes the impossible leap from Dorset Street to Frying Pan Alley, a mean passageway off Petticoat Lane which seems like a corner of heaven after her experiences on the other side of the invisible boundary. Nehama is a wonderful fictional creation, a haplessly innocent 17-year-old when the book opens. The youngest of six sisters, she runs away from Plotsk in Poland in search of her dream, a house of her own, “and, even more important, some heroic act that would surprise everyone.” Quite predictably, she falls into the clutches of unscrupulous and heartless operators as soon as she docks in London, penniless and unable to speak a word of English.
Nehama’s degradation (she is literally sold into prostitution) is total, and almost unbearably painful to read. A combination of pluck, luck, and the kindness of strangers propels her back to freedom. In material terms, she will never rise above Frying Pan Alley—her ambition to own even a small shop of her own repeatedly foiled by harsh circumstance—but she will grow mightily in character and spirit. Nehama thirsts for knowledge almost as much as she does for the necessities of life; over the course of 25 years, she will build up a library of precious second-hand books that includes Pride and Prejudice and Oliver Twist. But her favourite is a cheap romance “about the girl who wasn’t beautiful or good but rebellious. She never compromised herself, not for lover and not for God, and always she looked for a way to live.”
Nehama’s story is twined with that of Emilia Rosenberg, a pregnant runaway from Minsk in Russia. Emilia is beautiful, educated, and wealthy but emotionally stunted by a poisonous home environment, in which her monster of a father preys upon her neurotic mother. Nehama becomes Emilia’s guardian angel in London, deflecting her from a career on the streets. Emilia rewards Nehama’s generosity by abandoning her child to her care and escaping across town to Soho in the West End. Hanging a gold crucifix around her neck, she passes as a Christian and finds a job in the curio department of Liberty’s. A less-than-believable chain of circumstances leads to her marriage to a successful Jewish writer, whose assimilationist family gives her a surprisingly warm welcome.
Contrived as this plot twist is, it allows Nattel scope to contrast Jewish life in the East and West Ends of the city of 5 million with its 100,000 “enormously visible” Jews. In a mini ghetto among the prostitutes of the theatre district, shops carry Yiddish signs “and the market smelled just like the East End, but here Jews brought gallery tickets to the English theatre.” West End Jews look down their noses at the vibrant Yiddish theatre life across town; to them real culture must be English, the language of Shakespeare. Emilia’s prosperous in-laws call Yiddish a jargon, even though it remains the language of the family’s sage patriarch. They cringe and fret as boatloads of immigrants arrive in London and the “Jewish question” is debated in Parliament. “After all, it had been only 700 years since the Jews were expelled from England and seven since they’d been driven out of Moscow.”
By turns earthy, by turns lyrical, The Singing Fire authoritatively conjures up the fog-and-smoke filled breath of London, at the same time as it’s steeped in an atmosphere of mystery, reaching for soaring, transcendental truths. Nattel’s greatest strength, however, is not as a stylist but as an old-fashioned storyteller. In the indomitable Nehama and her devoted husband, Nathan, she has fashioned two unforgettable characters over whose fates, I must confess, I wept unabashedly more than once as I raced through this fine novel.
The Singing Fire
by Liliane Nattel
Review published in
January 30, 2004
March 27, 1999
There are any number of paradoxes about Lilian Nattel and The River Midnight: paradoxes such as a career in chartered accountancy proving an excellent apprenticeship for writing a magic-tinged novel about 19th-century shtetl life. Or like transposing a P.E.I. landscape to a fictional Polish-Jewish village named Blaszka. Even like coming to terms with being a Jewish writer, yet deeming The River Midnight to be a very Canadian book. But the thing about all of these paradoxes is that they seem completely integrated into the down-to-earth life of the open-faced, articulate and patently sincere author of The River Midnight who claims her Montreal background as a profound influence in the writing of a first novel that's making international waves in the early months of 1999.
One thing is unequivocally clear, however. Though Nattel has always wanted to be a writer, her road to becoming one has been uphill. And the astonishing speed with which The River Midnight was accepted upon its completion in the summer of 1997 and its foreign rights sold to the U.S., Britain, Germany, Holland and Italy within a couple of months after, surprised no one more than its author, who believed, even as she was working on the book "that everybody knows that successful novels take place in contemporary America." She, on the other hand, was gripped by a particular vision of Jewish life in the Poland of a century ago, that, shake it off though she tried, simply wouldn't let her go.
That vision encompassed both a long folkloric tradition of magic in Yiddish literature and the preoccupations of a Canadian woman of the 90s interested "in the items that often get left out of books about the shtetl, except for marginalia: sex, women's lives, crime, the concrete ways that people live."
Nattel was born in Montreal in 1956 to Holocaust-survivor parents who arrived here in 1952. When she was growing up in Cote St. Luc in the 1960s and early 70s, "it was a unique area. It's less so now. Cote St. Luc was so universally Jewish that it certainly played into the formation of my imagination." Although her family wasn't traditionally religious, "our home was permeated by stories and songs and customs that both expressed the particularity of our background and the universality of human experience." The Holocaust was integrated into the totality of Jewish experience on occasions such as Passover, with her father drawing parallels between the enslavement of the Jews in ancient Egypt and his own concentration-camp experiences.
Although her parents grew up in big Polish cities, not shtetlach, "I was very drawn to that world because that was where my (ancestors) came from. There was a mystique around their background and the relatives I never got to see." Her parents spoke Yiddish when they didn't want the children to understand what they were saying: a wonderful incentive to do well at the afternoon Yiddish lessons she attended three times a week after Westminster school let out for the day.
But Nattel didn't live in a hermetically sealed Jewish world. Music classes run by nuns at École Vincent d'Indy "in retrospect gave me that sense of multiple cultures living side by side, the way you have Jewish Poles and Catholic Poles in the shtetl." She is quick to point out that the relationship between Jews and French-Canadians does not equate with that of the historic tortured connection between Jews and Poles, but as a Montrealer transplanted since her university days to Toronto, she sees a contrast in the Jewish life of the two Canadian cities. (Toronto has "an accepted, unified culture where you have all sorts of people from all different cultures but everybody agrees that they all share the majority culture.")
Nattel's early literary loves included L.M. Montgomery, Madeleine l'Engle [SPELL CHECK???] and I.L. Peretz (in the original Yiddish), and, around the age of ten, when she realized that not all authors were dead ("before that I thought the book industry was closed to the living"), she decided to become one herself. But she was derailed from her path when she graduated from York University in English literature and couldn't find work. In a dead-end job that not only didn't pay but where she was treated with contempt ("'Just shut up and type, don't think,'"), she lost her nerve. "I thought, I'm not a real writer, because real writers could write from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m. and sleep three hours and go to a dead-end job, and be great writers." And without any idea as to what an accountant does, she decided to study to become one because she wanted to be her own boss.
And that's where the paradox came in. Juggling a day job, studying at night, she learned about obstacles and how to overcome them. For the first time in her life, she became disciplined and acquired the skills of doing research. Within a few years of having become a chartered accountant, she realized that if she had a part-time practice, she would make time to write. In her 30s, she picked up the pen again. But going the route of small literary magazines didn't bring automatic success. "There was one year when I made 53 submissions and didn't sell a thing."
The idea for The River Midnight came when, at 36 and feeling at a crossroads, she decided to take a continuing education course in writing and personal creativity. During a class exercise, she imagined "an earth mother-type laughing; she was standing on a beach in prehistoric Hawaii beside a rack of drying fish." Nattel giggles. "Unfortunately I don't know anything about prehistoric Hawaii."
She had just given birth to Misha the midwife, the central character of The River Midnight. Initially she wrote a short story set in a shtetl. But she had to overcome her own resistance to being a Jewish writer before she allowed herself to develop it into a large, panoramic novel.
At first, she fought the fear in herself of being ghettoized and worried about being patronized as writing for a parochial audience. But, on a deeper level, she has come to see her plight as a broader, generational one. "For the post-Holocaust generation of writers I think it has taken longer to find a voice for ourselves that integrates our Jewish experience but also lets ourselves express who we are in our time. Because the Holocaust was such an overwhelming event, so epic, so grand, so tragic. It is so inexplicable and terrible, it has taken longer to stand up after that."
One of the factors that helped her find her voice, she says, "was the influence of being a Montrealer. Montreal has an old tradition of Jewish writers knowing about their own tradition. A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, Mordecai Richler for me legitimized the whole idea of being a Jewish writer."
Although until now she has travelled little, touring with The River Midnight in Britain and the U.S., "I've come to the conclusion that The River Midnight is a very Canadian book, even thought it's not set in Canada, and has nothing to do with snow. Growing up here legitimizes a story like The River Midnight. It's intrigued me to see people of my generation in the U.S., for instance, and after a couple of immigrant generations, coming out of an assimilationist background where their parents erase and wipe out their individual heritages and kind of blend in like mashed potatoes. People from all different backgrounds are so responsive to the book ... because of the legitimacy it gives to bringing in your heritage as part of who you are. It nourishes you like water feeds a plant."
There's another way this book is Canadian. Writing the outline for the novel in a cottage in P.E.I. in 1994, Nattel had a vision as she gazed out of her window at the Hillsborough River, some ten miles from Charlottetown. That vision sparked by the Charlottetown Bridge that connects the North and South Shores of P.E.I. ("The bed is swimming up a river, past stone pylons where black birds congregate like the parliament of Old Poland. The bed floats under the criss-cross metal beams of the bridge, between herons walking in the shallows with their skinny long legs...") has insinuated itself as a stand-in for the Polish landscape Nattel will visit for the first time only this spring.
In a remarkably frank interview, the only question Nattel hedges is the one about money. She will not say how much the advances for The River Midnight have been, but her life has changed in only one significant way since last year. She no longer has to work as a chartered accountant; it is profoundly liberating to not have to go through a tax season this spring. "This thing that I had run away from, this thing that wouldn't let me go, against all conventional wisdom has brought me my lifelong dream to be able to write full time."
The River Midnight
by Lillian Nattel
Review published in
March 27, 1999
November 11, 2011
An arresting title: The Virgin Cure. Arresting, too, the shocking myth it alludes to, a widely held belief of the 19th century that a man with syphilis could “cleanse his blood” by having sex with a virgin.
The Virgin Cure is Ami McKay’s follow-up novel to her highly successful debut, The Birth House. Set in rural Nova Scotia in the First World War era, The Birth House was inspired by McKay’s discovery that her home had once belonged to a midwife. The Virgin Cure goes back yet another couple of generations and shifts the scene to New York City’s Lower East Side in 1871. But its inspiration still remains personal. It so happens that McKay’s great-great-grandmother, Sadie Fonda Macintosh, was a pioneering physician in New York’s slums who championed poor women and children and wrote her thesis on venereal disease.
In an Afterword to The Virgin Cure, McKay notes that she originally intended to write the book in the voice of Dr. Sadie, as she calls the character. Indeed the novel – even more pronouncedly designed as a scrapbook than was The Birth House – contains Dr. Sadie’s (fictional) glosses and asides. But its first-person narrator isn’t a bluestocking do-gooder. Retracing her American ancestor’s footsteps in the old streets of Manhattan, McKay began to hear the words of a very different character, a 12-year-old street girl named Moth.
McKay dramatizes Moth’s beginnings with a masterful hand. The daughter of a Gypsy fortune teller and a ne’er-do-well who abandoned them both when Moth was 3, she endures privation in the worst of the tenements on Chrystie St. “The walls and roof of the outhouses leaned on each other like drunken whores, all tipsy, weeping and foul. … Boys grew into guttersnipes, then pickpockets, then roughs. … Girls sold matches and pins, then flowers and hot corn, and then themselves.” And yet Moth is a lover of the fire and energy of her native city. In an incantatory passage that presages her fall from such grace as Chrystie St. affords, she says, “We came from rear tenements and cellar floors, from poverty and pride. All sneak and steal, hush and flight, those of us who lived past thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old, those of us who managed to make any luck of ourselves at all – we became New York.”
Emotionally starved by her burdened and neglectful mother, Moth has two favourite fantasies. One is that her father will return and her mother will be transformed into the calico-clad cheerful woman kissing her daughter’s head on the laundry detergent box. Convinced that she is meant for better things than the slums, she also dreams of living in a mansion like the one owned by the independent spinster she stalks on summer nights.
What follows instead is the first of a chain of dreadful betrayals: Moth’s mother sells her, age 12, for an undisclosed sum to a rich and sadistic mistress as a lady’s maid. Mrs. Wentworth is a gothic horror, and the details of Moth’s enslavement test the reader’s stomach and credulity. Mercifully, the child escapes her torturer with the help of a sympathetic but venal butler, only to find on her return to Chrystie St. that her mother is gone without a trace.
Now totally homeless, Moth fends by begging and theft, ripe for exploitation. Predictably, she is inducted into prostitution – still at the age of 12 – but at a whore house with a difference. Miss Emma Everett runs a so-called Infant School, a doctor-inspected, high-class brothel specializing in young, “certified” virgins, who service wealthy older men. One of its patrons is the chief detective of the city’s police force.
It is in this establishment that Dr. Sadie’s path crosses with Moth’s. The suspense of the plot hinges on whether the doctor can save the girl from the fate she is intent on succumbing to. For although naive about sex, Moth has a totally realistic grasp of her situation. “My virtue was a dangerous thing to keep, especially on the street. … At least under Miss Everett’s roof I hoped I might get the chance to give it up for a fair price.”
Moth’s dark and spunky tale is shot through with some bright threads. Much of the pleasure of The Virgin Cure is derived from the ingenious way in which McKay weaves in extensive research on the fashions, mores and beliefs of the period. She brings the Bowery – the main thoroughfare of Moth’s neighbourhood – to life with its seedy dance halls, saloons and variety theatres. She shows us Dr. Sadie on her worthy rounds among the indigent. She reproduces ads for the circus, fashion reports from Harper’s Bazar and statistics on the life cycle of rats. Above all, she delivers another compelling story inhabiting the borderlands of popular and literary fiction.
The Virgin Cure
by Ami McKay
Review published in
November 11, 2011
November 26, 2011
"That man is a monster," writes Vera Schulz, a fictional Jewish girl in the Lodz Ghetto in December 1941. She is pouring her heart out in a diary, describing Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the historic head of the Jewish Council of the ghetto.
"His only achievement to date: selling out his own people in record time and stealing or embezzling all they own. Yet still a quarter of a million people look up to him as a god! What kind of human being is it who deliberately sets out to demean and dishonour as many people as possible, simply for his own advancement?"
Rumkowski's misdeeds and motivation serve as the main focus of Swedish writer Steve Sem-Sandberg's epic novel about the Lodz Ghetto, The Emperor of Lies. Sem-Sandberg is not the first to find in Rumkow-ski a horrifying muse. In Mr. Sammler's Planet, Saul Bellow referred to Rumkowski as "king of rags and shit - ruler of corpses." Rumkowski was also the inspiration for the title character of Leslie Epstein's Holocaust novel King of the Jews, and the subject of a documentary film titled The Story of Chaim Rumkowski and the Jews of Lodz.
The most nuanced treatment of this controversial and repellent figure is to be found in none of the above, however, but in Chava Rosenfarb's panoramic trilogy of the Lodz Ghetto, The Tree of Life, first published in Yiddish in 1972, and later translated into English by Rosenfarb's daughter, Goldie Morgentaler. In it, Rumkowski's actions are shown in all their cruelty and, yes, monstrousness - yet the man isn't depicted as a fiend, but as a deeply flawed, profoundly isolated human being.
I will state my interest here. Rosenfarb, a one-time Montrealer who died earlier this year, was my cherished friend. In my opinion - as both friend and critic - The Tree of Life is a masterpiece of Holocaust literature, stamped with a special imprimatur of authenticity. That authenticity stems from both its author's gifted pen and from her role as eyewitness to history, for Rosenfarb herself was a survivor of the ghetto.
Sem-Sandberg clearly cannot bring this bone-bred realism to The Emperor of Lies; for starters, he was born in 1958, 13 years after the end of the war. But he has done a prodigious amount of research, lacing his narrative with maps, photographs, news-paper excerpts, a glossary, footnoted translations and reconstructed speeches. In addition, he brings his own imaginative vision to one of history's darkest pages.
He starts the novel in December 1939 - three months after the German occupation of Poland - by reproducing a detailed Nazi memo that outlines plans for a ghetto. Its ghastly last paragraph reads: "Naturally, the establishment of the ghetto is only a temporary measure. I reserve the right to decide when and how the City of Lodz is to be purged of Jews. The ultimate aim must be to burn away this infectious abscess entirely, once and for all."
Rumkowski's career must be viewed in the context of this strategy. Sem-Sandberg depicts him as a social pariah, sexual predator and corrupt thug, whose nickname even before the outbreak of war was Mr. Death. He believed he understood the Nazis and could outwit them at their own game. In re-turn for autocratic power over the internal affairs of the ghetto, he promised to make it an industrial powerhouse supplying the German army with all manner of goods.
As despicable as he undoubtedly was, to an extent he succeeded. Though deportations to death camps were regular occurrences, and starvation, disease and terror dogged the lives of the ghetto's unfortunate inhabitants, it survived until August 1944, the last of the ghettos in Poland to be liquidated. This was in large part due to the astonishing productivity of the Jewish work-force under Rumkowski's iron rule.
The cost of this productivity was epic suffering. Sem-Sandberg's treatment of this misery is at times almost unreadable. Atrocity follows appalling atrocity, betrayal upon betrayal in an unrelieved catalogue of brutality. It doesn't help that the text jerks back and forth in time, the jagged chronology mirroring the disorienting nightmare of ghetto reality. Nor that so much space is devoted to Rumkowski's depraved inner circle, including his adopted son, portrayed as a perverted personification of evil. There is little evidence of the famed cultural life of the ghetto and none of its many illegal schools and underground synagogues.
Sem-Sandberg kills off all his characters, good guys and bad, an artistic choice that collides with historic truth. According to Wikipedia, about 10,000 of the 204,000 Jews who had been in the ghetto eventually survived.
A bestseller in Sweden, where in 2009 it won the Augustpriset, widely considered that country's highest literary honour, The Emperor of Lies is fast becoming a publishing phenomenon. It has been translated into more than 20 languages and has sold in the hundreds of thousands. Eminent British author Hilary Mantel has written that the novel "helps us to do what is so hard, simply to think about the Holocaust." Reaching those who have difficulty contemplating the Holocaust is a significant educational achievement. But those for whom the Shoah is an ineluctable reality may want to pass on a book in which Jews seem destined merely to slip from agony to death.
The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Elaine Kalman Naves is the author of the memoirs Journey to Vaja and Shoshanna's Story.
The Emperor of Lies
by Steve Sem-Sandberg
translated from the Swedish by
Sarah Death Anansi
Review published in
November 26, 2011
May 21, 2011
Many years ago when my daughter Jessica was a toddler, I began to record the stories my father used to recount of his early life in Hungary at the beginning of the 20th century. My father was a natural and fluid storyteller and I wanted to save his stories for posterity--a posterity embodied in the little girl babbling away and fiddling with the controls of the tape recorder. His first words, however, were stilted rather than fluid, intended for future generations: “I really don’t know if my life is worthwhile that its story should be put on record. I didn’t become an Einstein or a Sigmund Freud or a Moshe Dayan. But perhaps one can learn something from the life of anyone, so perhaps you can learn something from my life.”
The value of what an ordinary life may teach is the currency of the memoir, a genre that has become hugely popular in the past 20 years. A sub-specialty of autobiography, memoir has a more idiosyncratic and flexible form. While autobiography is generally the preserve of public figures and takes a chronological “breakfast-to-bedtime” approach to an entire life, memoir usually highlights one period or one theme of a life.
But, as Camilla Gibb writes in her elegant introduction to The Penguin Book of Memoir, “an individual life is virtually never set apart: it unfolds in the context of family and community and is shaped by the social and political forces of a particular time and place.” Or as the renowned Czech-Canadian author Josef Skvorecky once put it, “Some writers may think their only subject is themselves, [but] if they are any good they are telling the history of their times and of their people. If all a writer manages is a picture of her- or himself against a blank curtain, then the writer is just a miserable scribbler who never grew out of puberty."
Beginning with a meditation by Thomas King on the nature of storytelling (“the truth about stories is that that’s all we are”) and ending with an epilogue by Karen Connelly, who defines Canada as an “evolving anti-nation” in which it takes only a small leap to view “the other” as ourselves, the book is a collection of 18 eclectic personal essays. Gibb, an award-winning novelist, chose them as much on the basis of literary merit—all the contributors are professional writers—as of subject matter.
For the most part she has chosen well. Many of the excerpts come from books that are now classics of their genre (think Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and Michael Ignatieff’s The Russian Album); others are by mainstays of the CanLit canon, such as Dionne Brand, Sharon Butala, Wayson Choy and Wayne Johnston.
The best pieces illustrate Skvorecky’s dictum: while being highly specific, they transcend their particularity. They also play nicely off each other, a thought or theme in one essay resurfacing--with a spin—in another. Thus by means of a delicate sleight of hand, Lorna Goodison’s story of her parents’ devotion to each other and to their children manages to double as a tale of uprooting from the bucolic Jamaican countryside to a slum in Kingston. A similar theme echoes in Janice Kulyk Keefer’s description of her grandparents’ journey from a Ukrainian village to Toronto. Goodison’s country relatives sent her family care packages of country delicacies. Even 60 years after the fact, Kulyk Keefer’s aunt recalls the shock of seeing her father bring home a bag of eggs, milk and bread that he had to spend scarce money on. “At home the only things you needed to buy were what you couldn’t make yourself…. Soap you brewed from ashes and fat, oil you got from hemp seeds pressed at the mill.”
Themes of bitter struggle dominate several of the excerpts: explicitly, as in Ignatieff’s evocation of his grandparents’ battle for survival during the Russian Revolution and Ernest Hillen’s sensory-laden story of release from a Japanese pow camp, or more indirectly when the enemy is racism and prejudice as in the case of Warren Cariou’s discovery of his Native roots and Wayson Choy’s memories of Vancouver’s wartime Chinatown. But sometimes the adversary is as elemental as the raging ocean battled by Wayne Johnston’s fisherman father. And sometimes it is fate itself. The two last stories in the collection--Moira Farr’s memoir of losing her boyfriend to suicide and Ian Brown’s account of caring daily for a severely disabled child—are the most emotionally charged of all.
Even an excellent collection poses questions of omission or commission. When the purported aim of the anthology is to bring together a Canadian book of memoirs, the absence of francophone voices is glaring. Another peculiar oversight is the cold shoulder paid to the Holocaust—a subject of vast significance that has given rise to many fine Canadian memoirs.
These reservations aside, this is a graceful volume that ought to pique readers’ interest in the works of the writers represented in it. It certainly has sparked in me the desire to return to those of the memoirs from which these excerpts were taken that I already own, and to run to the nearest bookstore for the ones I don’t.
Chronicles of Ordinary Lives
Selected and Introduced by Camilla Gibb
Review published in
May 21, 2011
January 2004
My uncle in England, whom I interviewed six years ago with nebulous ideas for a book, keeps calling my mother to inquire about the progress of my research. My mother, the eponymous heroine of Shoshanna’s Story: A Mother, a Daughter, and the Shadows of History, yells loudly into the receiver (she’s 84, he’s 88, both of them deaf) that the book has been delayed. She’s lying. It’s out and neither of us wants it to fall into my uncle’s hands.
My mother loves her brother and so do I. A positive figure, he plays a cameo role in my memoir. I’ve gone out of my way to shield his privacy by changing his name in the story and I’m pretty sure he would approve of 99 per cent of what I’ve written. But he will never forgive me for including an incident in which, nearly 50 years ago, his devoted English wife, in the heat of one of those verbal slugfests from which even good marriages aren’t immune, called him “a miserly Jew.” He will not forgive my mother, either, since clearly she was the source for this item of “research.”
Ah, the pitfalls of writing about your family. Why include such a gratuitous and hurtful anecdote? What useful purpose does it serve?
Context is all and families are complex organisms. Believe me, I’d have been happy to leave it out; happiest of all if I’d never been subjected to this piece of family lore. I heard it first when I began to date the boy whom I call in the book the Boyfriend. (In time, he became the Fiancé, the Husband, and then, after many years, the Ex.) I was Jewish, he wasn’t. To warn me of the disaster she believed I was heading into, my mother invoked the story of my non-Jewish aunt and Jewish uncle.
If writing about my uncle was fraught, writing about the Boyfriend was devilishly so. At the time that I was describing my erstwhile passionate romance, I was in the process of messily divorcing him. How much to reveal, how to reveal it, how to be honest, how to be true—uncontaminated by rancour--to what once was? Above all, how not to disgrace and further pain our two wonderful daughters?
I think it was Philip Roth who famously said that once there’s a writer in the family, that’s the end of the family. Still, when you read Roth’s autobiographical writings, he comes across as a good and caring son to his parents.
It’s almost axiomatic that a writer doesn’t just expose herself, she exposes the people closest to her. Many writers hide behind the mask of fiction, and if I’d been able to do it convincingly, that would have suited me just fine. My first memoir, Journey to Vaja: Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family took a historic approach to my father’s family. Yet I knew when I began to doodle around my mother’s life that it called for a very different treatment. My father’s family had left historic footprints and their background—orthodox, educated, rooted in rural Hungary—lent itself to a measured, scholarly approach. My mother came from much more ordinary stock—small town merchants—but the stuff of her life, and those of her six siblings, really seemed the essence of fiction. Crimes of passion, triangular love stories, harrowing events from the Holocaust punctuated the tale. Besides which, despite her many outstanding qualities, she wasn’t an easy woman to have as a mother. My first instinct—both from the point of view of the material and my emotional ambivalence to her--was to write a novel. I tried it two different ways, wrote more than a hundred pages. Not only was it no good, it made me ill. All my life I had heard from my mother her version of an unfolding universe; in my guise of first-person narrator of her life, I felt as if I’d suddenly crawled right beneath her skin. A very tight and uncomfortable place for the two of us. On top of it all, it sounded like melodrama, shlock even.
Had I come across at that time what the great American literary journalist John McPhee has written on the subject of creative non-fiction, it might have helped. "Things that are cheap and tawdry in fiction work beautifully in non-fiction because they are true. That's why you should be careful not to abridge it; it's the fundamental power you're dealing with. You arrange and present it. There's lots of artistry, but you don't make it up."
Unfortunately I didn’t encounter McPhee until much later. But in a hit and miss kind of way, I inched my way towards the voice I needed. It was a child’s voice, but a knowing one. And this child had the nerve to call her mother by her first name.
Once, long ago, my mother had told me about orphans she had looked after when she was young. Right after World War II ended, a few years before I was born, she had returned from Auschwitz to Budapest and had found work looking after displaced children with whom she planned to emigrate to Palestine. She was called Anna, but the children gave her a Hebrew nickname, Shoshanna. Somehow that little nuance, calling her by another name, yet one that wasn’t made up but was on some level true, became the key guiding me back to non-fiction.
Other writers have taken different routes to solve similar problems. A couple of years ago, I interviewed Margaret Drabble on the occasion of the publication of The Peppered Moth, a novel inspired by her mother’s life. The fictional Bessie Bawtree was in all important respects modeled on Kathleen Marie Bloor Drabble, “a highly intelligent, angry, deeply disappointeed and manipulative woman.” Yet Drabble said she rejected the idea of autobiography or memoir. She wanted the liberty of shaping the book freely and of inventing subsidiary characters. She wished also to avoid interviewing other family members (one of her sisters is the novelist A.S. Byatt) who had different takes on her mother’s life from her own.
I, too, have a literary sister, Judith Kalman. The fact that she had staked out a career in fiction and written a beautiful collection of linked stories, The County of Birches, out of our shared background undoubtedly influenced me to cast my work as non-fiction.
The boundaries between the two genres aren’t always cut and dry, though. Five years ago, I attended the McLean-Hunter Arts Journalism/Creative Non-Fiction program at the Banff Centre for the Arts, under the tutelage of Michael Ignatieff. I was working on an early chapter of Shoshanna’s Story about our family’s experiences during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. It contained a long flashback scene to World War II for which the source had been my late father. I had conducted an interview about this with him years earlier, way before I had the slightest inkling I was going to write books. A crucial moment in the story has a group of Jewish labour servicement crossing a bridge to safety, under the eyes of German military police.
A couple of the participants in the Banff program were primarily fiction writers and, when my piece was workshopped, they asked me to add more details about the bridge. Was it wood or stone? What was its span? Had it been mined? I said I didn’t know, I hadn’t thought to ask my father, and now it was too late. I could think of no way of finding out.
“Make it up,” they urged. ”We need to know more about the bridge.”
“I can’t,” I said, starting to feel both stubborn and stupid. “I don’t know more.”
Ignatieff entered the fray. "Don’t forget you’re all writing non-fiction here! There are constraints in non-fiction but they can be used as opportunities. You've got one hand tied behind you. The art is to make that work for you."
And so I tried to make it work for me by being as truthful as I could be about the life of my family. I didn’t know whether the bridge was built of brick or metal, but I could remember and evoke other details: the colour of emotions, sources of friction, the taboos and codes we lived by, when and why we sometimes lied about who we were. And I hoped that readers as well as my kith and kin would understand I was lifting the veil of family privacy not from a desire to spice things up or point fingers, but from the conviction that the power of this story lay in equal measures of honesty and compassion.
"Lifting the Veil: The Pitfalls of Writing about Family"
This essay was published in
January 2004
November 27, 2004
In Monique Charlesworth’s impeccably researched novel, The Children’s War, on separate occasions two very different characters come to the conclusion that history is written by winners. The first speaker, a German Colonel in the SS, maintains that might makes right, “everything was legitimate if you won.” The second man, a French curé and member of the Resistance, points out that since it’s the victors’ version of history that will prevail, “nobody will tell the story of the children.”
A British writer who has lived in France and Germany and is fluent in both French and German (the two languages pepper the text throughout), Charlesworth has chosen to recount this raw and painful tale of the ravages of war through the eyes of two German children, one a girl, the other a boy. Both around 13 in 1939, their linked lives are a kind of mirror image of each other.
Ilse is the daughter of Otto Blumenthal, a Jew, and Lore Lindemann, a Lutheran. In her small hometown of Wuppertal, she bears the stigma of Jewishness, though ignorant of Jewish beliefs and practice, and largely abandoned by her father, whose left-wing politics as much as his origins have removed him from her life.
Nicolai Bucherer is the son of a Hamburg university professor and a frivolous heiress. His life is privileged but troubled. He attends Hitler Youth activities without enthusiasm, is leery of his Nazi older half-brother, and uneasy about the quarrels of his parents over his father’s refusal to join the Party.
On the eve of war, Ilse’s mother Lore—a lawyer unable to practise law, since Hitler has forbidden women to do so—makes a fateful decision. She has saved enough to either send Ilse by herself to Morocco to be sheltered by relatives, or to get the two of them to France together. Lacking confidence in her ability to make a living in a strange country, Lore dispatches the child to Morocco. Initially this seems a wise move; ilse’s six-month sojourn there with her uncle, a naturalized French citizen, provides an oasis of colour and security in a life that has so far been punctuated by persecution and family strife. She dreams of Lore joining her in her new exotic home where “they would forget all about Germany and never talk about it ever again.” In the meantime, Lore finds a job as a nursemaid in the Bucherer household in Hamburg, thus supplying the connective tissue between the two narrative strands of the novel.
Lore’s plans for Ilse’s safety backfire when war breaks out and the uncle returns the child to France. From this point on Ilse is a fugitive—cut off even by mail from the mother she adores. We follow her tortuous progress in German-occupied Paris, Marseilles, and Cannes with horrified fascination as the author meticulously recreates a world of fear, subterfuge, massive societal hypocrisy, and the nitty gritty of life on the perpetual run.
On one level Children of War is a clear and lucid exploration of the nature of survival. At the same time, it’s a clever and subtle tale that draws its strength from the anomalous and ambiguous points of view and situations of its two engaging protagonists and of the flawed adults who orbit around them.
Brought up without religion, Ilse finds solace in Catholic churches whose “rituals and holy smells” soothe her. Nicolai strikes up a friendship with a subversive proletarian boy who introduces him to Hamburg’s underground jazz clubs. Ilse becomes involved in another kind of underground, smuggling refugees from France into Spain. The shifting tides of war slowly reconfigure the notion of where safety lies. Hamburg, to where Lore valiantly but vainly tries to get Ilse to return, becomes an inferno during the Allied bombing raids of 1943. Charlesworth describes these attacks with singular power and imaginative reach.
The unreliability of adults and the difficulty of knowing what the right course of action might be give this book a sense of nuanced authenticity. Ilse’s father is a case in point. A difficult and unpleasant man who uses the child as a pawn in his protracted battle with Lore, he is nonetheless the moral compass of the novel. Only towards the end of the book do we recognize that Otto’s stubborn idealism and intractable opposition to fascism from the get go were the appropriate responses to evil.
The publicity material accompanying The Children’s War states that it’s based on real events experienced by the author’s family. Reading between the lines of Charlesworth’s bio and her aknowledgements, I found it impossible not to speculate that Ilse’s tale is based on that of Charlesworth’s own mother. If so, it helps explain for me why Ilse’s sections of the novel are tauter and more compelling than Nicolai’s.
But I quibble. This suspenseful and beautifully written work about World War II will inevitably give rise to reflections not only about the story it ostensibly recounts, but also about today’s children of war.
The Children’s War
by Monique Charlesworth
Review published in
November 27, 2004
