Recent Reviews
House on Endless Waters by Emuna Elon
I hope you are adjusting to your new routines as we all do our part to flatten the curve of new infections.
Emuna Elon’s exquisite novel House on Endless Waters bears witness to one man’s search for the truth about his childhood during WWII in Amsterdam. The book, translated from the Hebrew by Anthony Berris and Linda Yechiel, illustrates how instinct, unconscious and repressed memories can burst into a person’s consciousness. Beautifully written and structurally unique, Elon’s novel is a magnificent example of how a seemingly unknowable past can shape a person without their consent.
Yoel Blum is a writer and the protagonist of the narrative. When he speaks about the theme of the books he has written, he says, “The past cannot be hidden.” But ironically, this Israeli husband, father and grandfather’s past has always been hidden. When Yoel’s publisher persuades him to include Amsterdam on a book tour, he struggles whether to visit the city of his birth. He hesitates to break his deceased mother’s edict: Never visit Amsterdam. But he does.
While visiting the Amsterdam Jewish Historical Museum, he sees a grainy black and white film about the abundant cultural life of Amsterdam’s Jews before WWII. His mother, father, sister and a small boy appear in several frames, startling Yoel. He initially thinks he is the boy in his mother’s arms, but after watching the film over and over again, Yoel realizes he is not that small child.
Yoel disrupts his life and moves to the dwindling Jewish section of Amsterdam and researches at the Jewish Historical Museum. Rotating between WWII Amsterdam and present-day Amsterdam, we travel with Yoel on his emotional journey to learn the identity of the boy in the film and the true story of how his family moved to Israel. We learn of the cruelty inflicted on the Jewish population of Amsterdam during WWII. Yoel’s father was taken away and never heard from again. Yoel’s mother chose to allow Christian families to hide her children.
The most potent aspect of the novel is the way Elon writes about Yoel’s experience discovering the truth about his early years. The rain hovers, the mist descends, there is almost a dream sense to this story. Many of the scenes occur inside Yoel Blum’s mind.
Yoel tries to imagine growing up In Amsterdam, speaking Dutch and, attending the Esnoga Synagogue. In a scene at the Anne Frank Museum, Yoel merges the past and present. When Bat-Ami, his wife shows him that her cell phone could connect to the Anne Frank House Wi-Fi, he became confused: “If the Frank family hideout is connected to the net, why don’t those hiding use it to tell the world of their plight? Why are they not using the internet to call for help?”
Though Yoel’s mother’s experienced severe trauma, she told Yoel not to go to Amsterdam not because of her complicated past, but because of his. As a writer and researcher, Yoel discovers more about the suffering of his mother, her fellow Jews and his tumultuous beginnings. The novel becomes a book within a book as we learn how Yoel incorporates his present-day experiences into a fictionalized account of his family’s plight during the War. It is a grim story for his family and Amsterdam’s Jewish community; the anti-Semitic fervor spread like a plague. Only 8000 of Amsterdam’s 140,000 Jews survived WWII.
Emotional nuance permeates the novel as Elon comprehends the emotional weight he has carried from his childhood. Taken from their families and hidden, many children, like Yoel, learned to detach themselves emotionally.
The book is one man’s introspective journey to come to terms with the psychic pain and emotional cruelty that effected his family during WWII in Amsterdam. Yoel Blum comes to understand that the repercussions ripple into his present life. “Yoel discovers that there is no difference between past, present and future.” And by the end of the story, he feels more peaceful now that he knows the truth about his life. A beautiful story.
Apeirogon by Colum McCann
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on March 4, 2020
https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/apeirogon-looks-at-middle-east-with-empathy/
Apeirogon is a mind-bending and momentous new novel by Colum McCann. On one level, it is the story of two men, Rami Elhanan, an Israeli and Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian. Their lives converge after their young daughters are murdered in separate acts of political violence. In the wake of their misery, the two grieving fathers develop an unlikely friendship and begin to work together for peace. But like the book’s title (an apeirogon is “a shape with a countably infinite number of sides”), this book is so much more.
With the permission of these two real-life fathers, McCann imagines the lives of the two families while weaving their realities into the infinite complexities of the region. McGann’s intelligence and empathy permeate the book. He clearly listened with compassion as he learned about these men and the painful pasts of their people. For Rami, the fear of “dangerous Palestinians” and the memory of the Holocaust haunted his days. For Bassam, his time in an Israeli jail and the indignities of living in the West Bank tormented him.
In 1997, Rami’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Smadar, is killed by three Palestinian suicide bombers as she walks with her friends on a busy Jerusalem street. In 2007, Bassam Aramin’s ten-year-old daughter, Abir, is killed by an Israeli border policeman as she walks out of a candy store near her school in Anata in the West Bank.
Both families are traumatized by the violent deaths of these young girls. Each father ponders revenge. Each, though, eventually joins the Parents Circle, a support group for Jews and Arabs whose children have been killed in the conflict. What drives the narrative is how the two bereft fathers learn to lean on each other. They become friends, begin to call each other brother and speak about their experience around the world. They come to believe that there is potential for peace if they (and eventually others) can comprehend the history of one another. “Bassam and Rami gradually came to understand that they would use the force of their grief as a weapon.”
It is hard to do justice to the multi-layered nature of McCann’s storytelling. The novel is comprised of 1001 chapters, echoing ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, a collection of Middle East folk tales. Some chapters are a single sentence; some several pages. He incorporates numerous non-fiction facts that shed light on the area’s complicated and painful history. These facts add to the richness of this hybrid novel as we learn of the complex quagmire that is the Middle East. He includes details about David and Goliath, the Crusades, the Holocaust, the War for Independence, the Occupation, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Wailing Wall, Theresienstadt and Buchenwald. Also included are anecdotes about Freud, Spielberg, Mahmood Darwish, John Kerry, Arafat, Jesus, the Qur’an and the Torah. He explores the etymology of words, the history of towns and the artists, writers, musicians, mathematicians and scientists whose contributions have impacted both these communities.
McCann points out the paradoxes, ironies and tragic limitations of people to resolve their differences and overcome the persistent cycle of violence. Sorrow hovers in the pages of ‘Apeirogon,’ but McGann’s book does offer hope. As Bassam states, “We were killing each other, over and over and over. There will be security for everyone when we have justice for everyone. It’s a disaster to discover the humanity of your enemy, his nobility, because then he is not your enemy anymore, he just can’t be.” The bumper sticker affixed to Rami’s motorbike states, “It will not be over until we talk.” These statements capture the novel’s powerful themes. Despite criticism from their respective communities for collaborating, Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin move forward with courage and leadership. Thanks to McCann’s groundbreaking book, the rest of us can better know their world and try to emulate their example of listening to others with empathy.
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
In 2016 I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me. In this letter to his son, Coates describes the painful burdens that African Americans carry from slavery to the present. Coates’s seeks to warn him of our country’s history of enslavement and warn him about the scourge of racism that he will soon navigate.
While Between the World and Me is a polemic, Coates’s first novel, The Water Dancer allows him to write in a freer form. The book illuminates the excruciating emotional toll slaves endured as their families were separated and sold. This painful but liberating story is narrated by Hiram Walker, who was born into slavery on a Virginia plantation called Lockless. The estate is owned by his inept and feckless white father, Howell Walker. When Hiram was young, Howell cruelly sold Hiram’s mother Rose. This trauma haunts Hiram. Realizing that Hiram is curious and capable, Hiram’s father insists that Hiram take care of his lazy white older brother Maynard (repeating the pattern of slaves taking care of their masters). His father says to Hiram, “I have made it known how high you sit in my esteem. It is not fair, I know it, none of it is fair. You have to save Maynard, son. You have to protect him.”
When Maynard drowns in a carriage accident, Hiram’s father needs Hiram to assist with the plantation. His father arranges for a tutor. Since Hiram is intellectually gifted, he learns to read and write quickly. Hiram still lives in the slave quarters and understands that he will always be considered property. Hiram is alone. He soon gains insight into the limited capabilities of Virginia plantation owners. Many slave owners are unskilled farmers who are neither smart nor capable and thus rely on the expertise and experience of their slaves. Hiram states, “The masters could not bring water to boil, harness a horse, nor strap their own drawers without us. We were better than them – we had to be. Sloth was literal death for us, while for them, it was the whole ambition of their lives.”
Hiram witnesses the many ways his father steals from his slaves. Hiram eventually runs away, is captured, escapes captivity, lives as a free man in Philadelphia and becomes part of the Underground Railroad. Besides his ability to forge papers and convey information, Hiram has extraordinary powers, like Harriet Tubman, who appears in this novel. Coates endows them with a magical realism gift called Conduction. Using the power of memory, Hiram, like Harriet Tubman, can transport slaves to freedom.
The novel calls out the pathology of the white plantation owners who project their own fears and desires onto their slaves. Hypocrisy is rampant across many domains. For example, white people propagate the myth that black men want to rape white women, but in reality, those myths are projections. It is slave owners like Hiram’s father who assault black women like Hiram’s mother. As Hiram gets older, he comes to love a woman named Sophie. Sophie is not required to do farm work because she is Hiram’s Uncle Nathaniel’s girl. Nathaniel calls for Sophie whenever he wants. Hiram writes, “This ‘arrangement’ was not unusual, was indeed the custom of the men of ‘quality’. And like the dumbwaiters and secret passages that the quality employed to mask their theft, Nathaniel too employed means to take as though not taking and transfigure robbery into charity.”
Though The Water Dancer meanders at times Coates is a wise and talented writer. What makes this book unique is his insight into the mindset of the mediocre white oppressors who, in attempting to erase the humanity of their slaves, reveal their dishonor and debasement. As Hiram says, “For it is not simply by slavery that you are captured, but by a kind of fraud, which paints its executors, as guardians at the gate, staving off African savagery when it is, they themselves who are savages."
