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3.0 out of 5 stars
The House of Life, November 25, 2010
This review is from: The White Space Between (Paperback)
The ancient Jewish cemetery in Prague is known as the House of Life, a beautiful concept. It figures in Ami Sands Brodoff's intimate but ambitious novel about a Holocaust survivor still trying to find her way back to life after narrowly escaping death sixty years before. A friend once said to her: "Jana, now you fear life as you once feared death." At heart, this novel is about the painful return to life following a spiritual withdrawal that has affected not only her but also her daughter Willow.
Now known as Jane Ives, Jana is a retired New Jersey kindergarten teacher in her eighties. After a happy childhood in Prague, she was 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" to cover a cause of death that was always the same. Somehow she survives and comes to Montréal, living there for two separate periods before settling in New Jersey, pregnant with 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 mama's girl 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.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
An important story, August 24, 2011
This review is from: The White Space Between (Paperback)
The White Space Between is an important story that explores not only how one survives the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust, but how the children of survivors come to terms with the secrets and deceptions of their parents who sought to protect them and themselves from the psychological aftermath of the atrocities they suffered. The characters are convincing and the various settings of the book feel authentic. Several scenes are sure to trigger a deep emotional response in the reader.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A narrative tour de force, August 14, 2011
This review is from: The White Space Between (Paperback)
Through multiple inventive modes of storytelling, from lyrical "memory book" entries to survivor testimony to alternating mother-daughter perspectives, Ami Sands Brodoff reaches the vast and unknowable through the specific and familiar. This is a touching story of a Holocaust survivor. But it is also a story of a mother and daughter, of a well kept secret, of the inextinguishable impulses to make art, to remember, to love -- and to live. Montreal comes alive as much more than backdrop; the city and the mountain are very nearly characters in and of themselves, and provide a refreshing literary setting for the story of Jana and Willow.
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