Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth (35 page)

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

David Davidar, my publisher, inspired me with his humanity, spirit of generosity, and unwavering integrity. David will never know how much I owe him for his faith in my work; creativity cannot thrive without the sustenance of such faith.

It was a joy to work with my editor, Nicole Winstanley. Nicole’s unfailing good humour, patience, energy, and insightful comments were a gift. The entire Penguin team has been incomparable. A special thanks to copy editor Heather Sangster for astute and thorough scavenging.

Joan Deitch, who lives in London, is a brilliant, devoted editor as well as fab friend and confidante, sweet and funny and unstinting with her time and expertise. Her encouragement was invaluable; she held my hand through all the panicky middle-of-the-night worries and entertained me with her lovely letters.

Penn Kemp came up with many imaginative, sensitive, and poetic suggestions. I am very grateful to Derek Fairbridge for his careful reading and numerous helpful comments. I am obliged to John Detre for making time to answer questions about the 1960s and for generous professional assistance. It was, as usual, fun plying Ken Sparling with musical questions; apart from providing scintillating answers, Ken always had a wise and intriguing word for me.

I was deeply moved by the heartfelt responses to the manuscript of Tom Deitch, Cesar Garza, and Ruz Gulko.

Marsha Ablowitz, who was so kind to me when I was five years old, reappeared in my life and was as kind as ever. Her contribution is deeply appreciated.

For unending support and quota-free listening as I made my way through all the stages of producing this book, and for enthusiasm
about my writing these past forty years, I thank, inadequately, Shirley Rand Simha.

For expert help with many hurdles, I am grateful to Chris Heap.

Joan Barfoot understands everything. I can’t thank her enough for her thoughtfulness and magnificent books.

Many thanks to Mindy Abramowitz for the open line.

I am fortunate to have fellow-artists Richard Cooper and Margaret Wolfson on my side. I am most grateful to Andrea Levy for providing a loving second home for Larissa, and much else.

For technical help my thanks to Lisa diLanzo Brombal, Ze’ev Gedalof, Hélène Hampartzoumian, Howard Johnson, Peter F. McNally, Charles Stevens of Cottage Blooms, West Falls, and the staff at the wonderful Guelph Library, whom I kept busy and who were so very accommodating. I was extremely lucky to find the superb Tel Aviv photographer Shlomi Bernthal and gifted Israeli actor Shir Shomron for the cover photo, which was beautifully adapted by the inspired Penguin design team.

I would not have survived the demands of a sixty-hour workweek without the unrivalled sports therapist Johanna Thackwray.

I am humbled by the many heroic death-camp survivors in my life and family. In the end, there are no words with which to tell their story and no way to understand what they experienced. This silence hovers at the edges of the novel and of all our lives. We give it meaning by living with love and striving for justice.

This book is dedicated to my daughter Larissa, whose radiance transforms my life every minute of every day.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth
is the story of Maya Levitsky, a wise, witty, and unconventional art history teacher and daughter of a Holocaust survivor. When a brush with the past brings her to reflect on the singular events that have shaped her life, Maya begins, through the lens of her Jewish background, her sexuality, and her beloved art, to unravel the strands in her personal history that have both bound and anchored her. She asks questions that we have all struggled with at some point: How much do the living owe the dead, and how useful is it to look back? Where does the line between oneself and one’s family begin and end? Does evasion save or defeat us? How do we manage the shackles of guilt?

Set in Montreal, the book brings to life many familiar facets of the immigrant experience of the 1960s: the dry cleaners where Maya’s mother, lost inside a tangle of love and trauma, works to support her daughter; the hippie summer camp that lures Maya away from her mother; the Hebrew school that offers refuge from the perceived dangers of the outside world. Through her attachment to Rosie, Maya finds that, much as she wants to proceed on her own terms, she cannot escape the ghostly presence of the Holocaust and its incomprehensible horrors. When disaster makes its way into the lives of this second generation, Maya and her closest friends find themselves unable to rescue an innocence they never really possessed.

In this touching, searching, and unusually revealing story, Canadian novelist Edeet Ravel continues a project begun with her acclaimed Tel Aviv trilogy about the effects of war and trauma on ordinary people. Looking back from the vantage point of the present, Ravel’s wry but sympathetic narrator sheds light on the way that events—past and present, tragic and comic, casual and intimate—shape our lives and make us who we are. And while the book encompasses many issues and themes, from cultural transformations to the weight of both personal and common history, it is more than anything a tribute to the triumph of friendship and love in the face of tragedy. ■

AN INTERVIEW WITH EDEET RAVEL

I agree with Maya that no one has a simple or “ordinary” life—there is no such thing. When I give talks, someone in the audience inevitably asks, Why do you writers always write about such strange people? Actually, the strangeness of that question intrigues me, and I’d like to write about a character who asks it…. The answer is that it’s only a matter of how deeply and closely you want to look. It takes courage, or maybe foolhardiness, to examine the half-hidden peculiarities and uncertainties of life. I don’t think we understand anything in an absolute or final way, but when it comes to the Holocaust, we are really in the dark. Survivors can’t communicate their experience and we can’t imagine it. The idea of a non-survivor trying to describe that experience in a work of fiction dismays me, with the exception of books for children or second-generation memoirs like
Maus
, which is brilliant. ■

The characters and settings are so vivid in my mind that I get confused at times, and think for a moment that fictional events I’ve created really took place. It’s amusing to me when that happens. I see the story in my mind before I begin to write, or else I see it unfolding as I write. ■

I never know what small or large event will be recreated in my writing. I’m continually surprised by all the little things that surface and are just right for a story. But as soon as a detail from what we call real life enters fiction, it’s entirely transformed and stripped of its context. Fiction will always be that: artifice and construction. We have to interpret real life, too, as we go along. Any memoir I write today will be entirely different from one I’d write in ten years. Our perspective continually changes, and events take on new meaning. ■

The themes in my writing take shape on their own; they reflect my personal obsessions. But I don’t think about those obsessions as I write, I only know they’ll make themselves heard. It never ceases to amaze me how organized our unconscious is. But as a reader (and I’m not a privileged reader by any means), I’d say that Maya’s empty apartment is there for Rosie and for Anthony, that she doesn’t want anyone to take their place, that there’s a missing part of herself or her past, that her father and other victims haunt it, that she’s afraid of closeness, that she identifies with transients, that the apartment represents a shadow self, that she’s impractical and generous, and so on. But as a writer, I just knew that she’d keep that apartment empty. I try to shut off the analytical reader in me when I write. ■

This novel began as what is now a small scene in which Maya and Tyen meet on a winter night. Those two characters just came to me, and their sexuality was a part of who they were, as were their missing and half-missing mothers. But there is also that familiar chain in the novel: a character loves someone who loves someone else who in turn loves someone else (until Tyen breaks the chain). Maya rejects Anthony because she isn’t attracted to men, and that’s crucial to the plot. I came up with these characters so long ago, I no longer remember exactly how it all came to be. I have practising gay characters in all my novels, including the ones for young readers, though sometimes their appearance is brief. Who is not gay? Who is not an outsider? It’s only a question of degree. But yes, I think Maya is more sensitive to all the possibilities and impossibilities of life because of her sexuality. It all seems to fit in, miraculously. ■

I was thinking of that section as a type of
J’accuse
. Maya needs to tell Anthony what he did to them all. This is her moment of confrontation. It’s not first person distanced into second that you find in wonderful Lorrie Moore—this is more literal. That confrontation has to take place before Maya can move on and forgive. ■

These are things that just fit in with the story. I bought a
Teen
magazine from 1967 on eBay to see what Rosie was reading; it was a blast. “Mindboggling” was reported to me by the son of a survivor about twenty-five years ago. I had no idea why it stayed with me when entire years have vanished, until I used it for Maya’s mother. Then I knew why I’d retained the memory. My experiences with hair conditioner sum up my entire adolescence, but there’s no room to expand on that here. The text for the ad came from a library microfilm of
Vogue
; I wanted to get it exactly right. Everything goes back to the emotions that various artifacts and ideas have evoked. ■

The list of books I’ve enjoyed is so long I’ve never tried to assemble it. I like writing that sets out to do what all artists try to achieve: to find a way to convey our sense of the world as truthfully as possible, which means taking on its complexities. I’d need several lifetimes to read all the great works out there, especially since I like to read books I enjoy over and over again. I’ve never understood the concept of “guilty pleasure,” by the way, when it comes to reading. Why would people feel guilty about the sort of writing they enjoy? It’s odd. I can’t imagine reading for any reason other than pleasure. Listening to a book read by a wonderful actor heightens that pleasure. As always, I digress. ■

Writing is work, and I think the work aspect takes over, and sadness has to be set aside to some extent. As a reader, I do find some books very painful to read (in the case of Browski’s
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
, for example, I could only manage two pages a day), but art is ultimately comforting for me, and I hope for my readers. ■