“Through her letters she had become the voice of this land and this sky, of all that was here and was good. He had marched into battle with her summer-scented letters in his breast pocket. Long after he had forgotten what he was fighting for, her words had been his compass point, unwavering and sure, leading him home.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (DEC 3, 2010)

Although set around 100 years ago, including the period of the 1914–18 war, this gentle novel is not primarily about the soldiers, but the mothers, sisters, and loved ones they leave at home. The setting is Walvern, a small village in rural Ontario, where everybody knows everybody else. Or they think they know them, for acquaintance can turn easily into gossip and suspicion. Peg Staynor, the heroine, becomes a victim of it, even as a child. For her curiously pale grey eyes and solitary manner play into local suspicions that she is a “river child,” the reincarnation of someone previously drowned, who will bring them bad luck. It is a barely credible device (and unfortunately not the only example of somewhat strained plotting), but it works well as a metaphor for a loneliness that gradually turns into independence and strength. For this is essentially a coming-of-age story with a sweet touch of romance, and Peg makes a heroine who is very easy to care about.

The first part of the book takes us back to the girlhood of Peg’s mother, Rose. Growing up poor in the city, she suffers from gossip that she is the model for the pin-up drawings that her artist mother is forced to do to keep food on the table. Answering an advertisement for a housekeeper to a bachelor farmer, she moves to the country, marries, and has two children: Peg and her elder sister Sarah. So she understands when Peg is persecuted in her turn, and does all she can to protect her younger daughter’s freedom.

Unfortunately, Rose dies on the day that war is declared, and her husband turns to drink. So the girls are left to fend largely for themselves. The departure of young men to the front puts pressure on the local girls, rushing them into engagements, marriages, and in some cases pregnancy. Some of the soldiers return wounded in mind or body; others do not return at all. The beautiful and popular Sarah handles the situation poorly, though understandably so. The younger Peg is less directly affected, though she makes friends with a teenage boy who is counting the days until he can sign up to become a pilot. And she inevitably becomes involved in Sarah’s mistakes, finding in herself unexpected reservoirs of competence and kindness that bring this book at steady pace to a heartwarming ending.

This (after Ami Sands Brodoff’s The White Space Between) is the second book that I have reviewed from Second Story Press, a company founded in 1988 “dedicated to publishing feminist-inspired books for adults and young readers.” The young-adult designation fits this particular book well. True, there are other female Canadian authors who treat similar subjects more compellingly: Alice Munro, for instance, or Jane Urquhart in The Stone Carvers. But Lori Ann Bloomfield has an honest voice with little self-consciousness and much warmth, and this alone makes her novel worth reading.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Second Story Press (September 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lori Ann Bloomfield
EXTRAS:	Interview with Lori Ann Bloomfield
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other Canadian women writers: Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro Changing Heaven by Jane Urquhart And one set in a small town in Ontario: The Girls by Lori Lansens

Bibliography:

• The Last River Child (2009)

“How can I describe to you what it feels like to have nothing left inside? To become hollow? For months, I could not live, would not die. Not here, nor there. The same man I told you about was with me. I was all alone, except for him. One day when I was too weak to dress, to eat, even to speak, he said to me: ‘Jana, now you fear life as you once feared death. You are more afraid of life than of death.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (DEC 3, 2010)

Filling in the gaps. Ami Sands Brodoff opens with an epigraph from Rabbi Avi Weiss: “The Torah is written ‘black fire on white fire’ . . . black fire refers to the letters of the Torah . . . the white refers to the spaces between the letters . . . they are the story, the song, the silence.” Exploring the story, singing the song, reflecting on the silence, these are the promises of this intimate yet ambitious novel, and they are both moving and beautiful. To say that Brodoff does not quite realize them is not to diminish the value of her search. The book is a sincere and obviously personal attempt to illuminate mysteries that may ultimately remain unknowable.

Jane Ives is a retired New Jersey kindergarten teacher. Now over 80, she was born Jana Ivanova in Prague and enjoyed a happy childhood before being caught up in the Holocaust and transported to Terezin and then Auschwitz. There, because of her good German, she became a “Secret Keeper,” typing out false death certificates, including for members of her own family, randomly selecting one of 34 approved “illnesses,” although the cause of death was always the same. Somehow, she survives and comes to Montréal, living there for two separate periods before she settles in New Jersey, pregnant with her only child, a daughter named Willow.

Jane raises Willow on the “memory books” she has kept of her childhood and life in Montréal. But there are gaps in the collection of photographs and in the stories that Jane is willing to share: the entire Holocaust period for obvious reasons and, more mysteriously, any details about Willow’s father. Perhaps in order to structure her own stories, Willow becomes a puppeteer, finding it easier to relate to her wood and plaster creations than to real people. When, at the age of 40, she is invited to a theatre collective in Montréal as artist in residence, she accepts. Coincidentally, Jane is also invited to Montréal by an organization called the Witness Foundation, to record her memories of the Holocaust. There, in this Northern city that Brodoff obviously loves, as the long winter finally turns to summer, mother and daughter begin their process of rediscovery, emerging from the spiritual hiding that had held them frozen for so long.

The post-Holocaust theme of emerging from a private world of suffering into a life led in public is undoubtedly an important one. It was treated very effectively, for example, by fellow Canadian author Anne Michaels in her Fugitive Pieces. But it requires a difficult balance between the inner life and the outside one that I don’t think Brodoff quite manages. There are too many inconsistencies and outright coincidences. The memory- book sequences of dialogue between mother and daughter work more like prose poems than the record of a real relationship; it is difficult to see Willow as the product of an ordinary American high-school and college. Curiously enough, as she pursues her career as a puppeteer, readers can feel enriched by admission to the arcana of her technical world; it is always fascinating to read about professionals engaged in the minutiae of their craft. But when the same sense of privilege extends to ordinary life, the result is merely distancing and hermetic.

Brodoff’s Montréal is presented virtually as a Jewish enclave, with hardly a gentile in sight. Yiddish expressions pepper the dialogue, sometimes obvious from the context, but not always. This is a subject that interests me considerably, and I really wanted to share Brodoff’s experience as a fellow human being. But I felt I was being continually pushed away, as though I didn’t belong, whether as a gentile reading a book about Jews, a man reading a book about women, or an adult reading a book intended perhaps for teenagers (as some other imprints from Second Story Press tend to be). Conversely, I responded positively to Willow’s work, as a theatrical artist myself. The best books transcend such coincidental identifications on the part of their readers; this one, I’m afraid, did not.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Second Story Press (October 1, 2008)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ami Sands Brodoff
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another take on a Holocaust novel: The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer

Bibliography:

• Can You See Me? (1999)
• Bloodknots: Stories (2005)
• White Space Between (2008)