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Being seen in stories
Mar. 10th, 2019 03:46 pmThirty Day Book Meme Day 10: Reminds me of someone I love
Most of the books I own remind me of someone I love, either because they were gifts from my mother (and I sort of feel that my love of reading was indirectly a gift from her, because she read aloud to me so much when I was a child, and encouraged me to be a reader), or from my husband, or I bought them on the recommendation of someone I love.
However, what I will go with today is The Girls in the Velvet Frame by Adele Geras. I mentioned this book in passing on an earlier day of the meme, but didn't go into much detail. It's the story of a family consisting of a widowed mother and her five daughters (ranging in age from thirteen to three), living in genteel poverty in Jerusalem in around 1918. There's also a flamboyant, outrageous unmarried aunt (whose stories of her misspent youth travelling around Europe both entrance and outrage her conservative Jewish relatives), and various neighbours in their block of flats who also feature as almost de facto family members; over the course of the book Rifka, the oldest daughter, begins working in a bakery and starts courting the young son of family friends, as part of a tentative future arranged marriage. Hovering just outside the pages is the missing oldest child of the family — the only son, who emigrated to New York seeking a better life, and who has essentially dropped off the map. He hasn't written, he hasn't sent money as promised, and it's a great source of worry and grief to his mother and sisters. The search for Isaac (the brother), is a subplot that meanders through the novel, involving the velvet framed photograph of the title, the community effort of Jewish migrants to New York, and the persistence and ingenuity of the five sisters. But the book's true focus is on the incidental stories of everyday life — sneaking out to feeding the neighbours' rabbits, tables laid with Eastern European cakes and tea, keeping up appearances in the face of poverty, snacking on sugared almonds at their aunt Mimi's house — and it is beautiful because of it.
Why it reminds me of someone I love — when I am neither Jewish, living in the early twentieth centuries, nor having ever experienced that kind of poverty — is its emphasis on the relationships between mothers, daughters, sisters and aunts (men are almost incidental, plot devices rather than characters, which is honestly often what my childhood felt like), and its insistence in putting the stories of women and girls front and centre. My mother isn't very like the mother in the story (although one of my aunts is quite like the aunt, something I recognised even when I first read the book as a seven-year-old), and I grew up with one younger sister, not four (although in adulthood I did end up with four younger sisters — the youngest three were born to my stepmother when I was seventeen, twenty-two, and twenty-nine respectively). But the book has always reminded me of my family, and the family dynamic of my maternal relatives — supportive to the point of bossy interference, in and out of each other's houses without warning or invitation, but happiest in each other's company in spite of everything. It was the first book I read that prioritised the kinds of relationships that were important to me when I was growing up, and showed that stories often treated as marginal, boring, or unimportant were worth being told.
( The other days )
Most of the books I own remind me of someone I love, either because they were gifts from my mother (and I sort of feel that my love of reading was indirectly a gift from her, because she read aloud to me so much when I was a child, and encouraged me to be a reader), or from my husband, or I bought them on the recommendation of someone I love.
However, what I will go with today is The Girls in the Velvet Frame by Adele Geras. I mentioned this book in passing on an earlier day of the meme, but didn't go into much detail. It's the story of a family consisting of a widowed mother and her five daughters (ranging in age from thirteen to three), living in genteel poverty in Jerusalem in around 1918. There's also a flamboyant, outrageous unmarried aunt (whose stories of her misspent youth travelling around Europe both entrance and outrage her conservative Jewish relatives), and various neighbours in their block of flats who also feature as almost de facto family members; over the course of the book Rifka, the oldest daughter, begins working in a bakery and starts courting the young son of family friends, as part of a tentative future arranged marriage. Hovering just outside the pages is the missing oldest child of the family — the only son, who emigrated to New York seeking a better life, and who has essentially dropped off the map. He hasn't written, he hasn't sent money as promised, and it's a great source of worry and grief to his mother and sisters. The search for Isaac (the brother), is a subplot that meanders through the novel, involving the velvet framed photograph of the title, the community effort of Jewish migrants to New York, and the persistence and ingenuity of the five sisters. But the book's true focus is on the incidental stories of everyday life — sneaking out to feeding the neighbours' rabbits, tables laid with Eastern European cakes and tea, keeping up appearances in the face of poverty, snacking on sugared almonds at their aunt Mimi's house — and it is beautiful because of it.
Why it reminds me of someone I love — when I am neither Jewish, living in the early twentieth centuries, nor having ever experienced that kind of poverty — is its emphasis on the relationships between mothers, daughters, sisters and aunts (men are almost incidental, plot devices rather than characters, which is honestly often what my childhood felt like), and its insistence in putting the stories of women and girls front and centre. My mother isn't very like the mother in the story (although one of my aunts is quite like the aunt, something I recognised even when I first read the book as a seven-year-old), and I grew up with one younger sister, not four (although in adulthood I did end up with four younger sisters — the youngest three were born to my stepmother when I was seventeen, twenty-two, and twenty-nine respectively). But the book has always reminded me of my family, and the family dynamic of my maternal relatives — supportive to the point of bossy interference, in and out of each other's houses without warning or invitation, but happiest in each other's company in spite of everything. It was the first book I read that prioritised the kinds of relationships that were important to me when I was growing up, and showed that stories often treated as marginal, boring, or unimportant were worth being told.
( The other days )