Novelists From Canada

"There are times in life when muteness is the only appropriate language."

"I feared to approach the world that I had lost. I was terrified of plunging once again into the abyss of suffering, of reliving the reality that had nearly destroyed me. I wanted to enjoy my life, to relish every moment. I had learned its value at great cost. I wanted to forget the nightmare. I deplored the fact that my memory was so vivid and would not allow me to forget. And I felt too weak, too incompetent, in the face of the enormity of what I had to describe. How could I encompass and give life to all those who populated my memory? Was not the novel too elegant and too polished a literary form for such a story, was it not too detached from any lived reality, too much a game of cleverly concocted plots? In writing a novel about the Holocaust would I not end by sinning against a reality that was impossible to encompass? Was I capable of recreating the specific atmosphere of those nightmarish days, assuming that it was possible to recreate it in the first place? As time went on, it became increasingly clear to me that no one, not even the most gifted writer, would be able to capture the true atmosphere of the ghetto. Even if the writer succeeded in writing a masterpiece, it would not, it could not, be the real thing. At the same time, it never occurred to me to consider any form but the novel as a vehicle for what I wanted to say. Only the novel seemed to have the necessary scope."

"I have no idea that at the same time in the United States of America, Theodore Adorno has come out with the sweeping declaration that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. A meaningful, powerful declaration, but it has nothing to do with me. The rhythms surging inside me deny his statement. I think of my father, who prodded me to write, even in the ghetto. I think of the poet Shayevitch, who wrote poems even in the camp, just days before he was sent to the gas chamber. They too deny Adorno's statement. As long as there is life, the human heart will never cease singing of its joys and sorrows. Up to the brink of the grave, man clings to his song, just as he clings to life. Moreover, those who feel the urge to sing, even when their throats emit only a whimper, or a screech, do not ask whether or not they ought to sing. Soon the philosophers will come, Sartre and Camus. Camus will say that life is absurd, nothing but the efforts of a Sisyphus. But the fact that he considers it important to write down his view of life proves just the opposite. Life without song, without spiritual expression, is absurd. Song gives meaning to the travails of Sisyphus."

"how can one speak of settling when your foundation has been ripped from under you? Nevertheless, one goes on."

"The air of liberated Bergen-Belsen began to resound with the familiar songs we had once sung. Near the barracks where our meetings took place, Jewish actors, who were themselves Holocaust survivors, took to the stage in a tent theatre. The golden peacock, symbol of Yiddish poetry and song, began to spread its broken tail. "Yidn shmidn zingen..." ("Jews, smiths, sing!") The words echoed triumphantly through the silent corridors of our former death camp, which was located a mere walk away from our place of entertainment."

"I will say no more about the horrors of the concentration camps. They are indescribable and untranslatable."

"what is writing if not a form of confession in disguise? No matter what the subject, all literary roads lead back to the self. The writer descends like a miner into the deepest shafts of her soul in order to unearth the blackest coals of her torment, or to retrieve the most glittering diamonds of her memories, and bring them back to the surface in the form of fictions that she wishes to share with the world."

"I think that books lacking such an introduction are like houses that one enters directly from the street, still wearing one's shoes and galoshes, still wrapped in the mood of outdoors. But an introduction to a volume of poetry functions like the anteroom to a house, a vestibule where one may shake off the burden of daily routine, where one may take off one's coat and boots, catch one's breath, pause for a minute to absorb the atmosphere of the dwelling one is about to enter."

"Writing is good therapy."

"Just like an object located in space, an event in time is subject to the laws of perspective; the object diminishes and fades the further one moves away from it. But with our tragedy, the opposite happens. The greater the lapse of time that separates us from our past, the clearer and larger our tragedy grows. Our reason cannot digest the ciphers of destruction; they become an abstraction called six million. We are young. Most of us are in our twenties. Our individual horror stories gathered together would outlast even the longest life. We crave the opportunity to tell at least some of these stories. But no one is willing to listen. So we tell them to each other. We remember. We reminisce. We forget ourselves in remembering. Steeped in our misery, we long for happiness. We live in two realities, the one that is past seeming more real, more palpable, than the actual one."

"The first day of the year 1939 was an unfortunate one for Samuel as well. Someone had broken the big front pane of his office window, and on the wall by the entrance to his factory, was printed in thick black paint: JEW - TO PALESTINE! (p32)"

"The elegance of your language stuns me."

"The idea of uplift is truly obscene when applied to fiction about the Holocaust, yet it is the main type of Holocaust literature English readers encounter: stories about brave fighters, altruistic rescuers, and sweet girls who insist that people are good at heart—or worse, easy bromides about the absence of God instead of accusatory truths about the evils of man...Does that mean imagination ought to have no place in writing about atrocity? Not at all. But a work about the Holocaust should necessarily be painful, not inspiring, and should honor the fullness of the loss, not only of individuals but of entire communities. Fortunately for English readers drowning in uplifting Holocaust stories, there exists a work in translation that accomplishes all this. It is Chava Rosenfarb’s The Tree of Life, a panoramic Yiddish-language trilogy about the Lodz Ghetto. To call it a masterpiece would be an understatement. It is the sort of work—long, immersive, engrossing, exquisite—that feels less like reading a book than living a life...The extreme level of detail that Rosenfarb gives to her portrait of Jewish Lodz, its people, and its passions, is itself an enormous achievement, a monument and a memorial to a destroyed community, written in the great (and alas, very long) tradition of Jewish literary lament. Yet The Tree of Life is not a work of testimony, but a work of art, and its power lies in Rosenfarb’s artistic invention. One character, the aspiring teenage poet Rachel Eibushitz, most closely resembles Rosenfarb herself, but this character is simply one of many and hardly the most important. Instead of memoir, Rosenfarb offers true imagination, bringing us into the minds of many different people and rendering even the most despicable figures with the utmost imaginative empathy...we as readers cannot expect the book to uplift us, the way we obscenely expect of every other book about atrocity. Reading this monumental work requires an active commitment. It provides a real service to mankind: It broadens your life beyond your own imagining, allowing your life to include many other lives within it. It brings you down to the deepest level of existence."

"In modern Yiddish writing, the moral, spiritual, and emotional capital of generations of Jewish women was utilized by male and female writers alike...Female prose writers, such as Fradl Shtok, Esther Kreitman, Rokhl Korn, Kadia Molodowsky, and Khava Rosenfarb, also deepened the awareness and understanding of the feminine contribution to Jewish civilization."

"Friday the first of September, at six o'clock in the morning, the Germans"

"I have many times tried to escape the subject of the Holocaust in my writing, but I have never succeeded. No matter which road I take, it invariably leads me back to the destination that I most want to avoid. My personal life and my literary life have forever been divided into two eras, the era before and the era after the Holocaust, and only from this perspective am I capable of viewing both my own life and human history."

"I’d never say I don’t want him coming to my rescue if I need it. I’m a feminist, not an idiot."

"I no longer wonder at Victorian mortality rates. Now I just marvel that anyone survived at all."

"After all, women feign interest in men all the time to better their positions."

"I feel that the more I discuss the future with you, the more discouraged I become."

"“Have you been drinking?” I say. “Why does everyone ask me that when I am in a good mood?”"

"She isn’t old and cranky. She’s just cranky."

"To her credit, she is interesting. In the same way as a venomous snake."

"Ultimately, you are his physician, which is probably why he is about to die."

"My husband is already dead. He only needs to stop breathing to make it official."

"Judging by what I read of Lady Inglis’s letter, Victorians are having—and enjoying—sex. They just don’t talk about it. How terribly Victorian of them."

"He flips a thruppence my way. I catch it. “Why thank you, sir. I find I have grown most fond of money.” “Odd. That seems a common condition among those who do not have it.”"

"There’s cruel, and then there’s downright evil."

"Science and popular opinion rarely progress at the same rate."

"Like so many regulations the Anatomy Act was created to solve one problem and caused another."

"Victorian flirting doesn’t require much. Flatter him. Laugh at his jokes. Let him ogle my cleavage. Okay, this probably also works in my own time."

"Here’s where I’m going wrong. Well, one of the many ways I am going wrong. I feel superior to these people. I’m from the twenty-first century. So much more enlightened than them. That’s bullshit, of course. I have the advantages of the modern world. Thinking it makes me smarter is the polar opposite of “enlightened.”"

"Fate deals unexpected hands, and we learn to play the cards we are given."

"Yet not everyone reading broadsheets realizes they aren’t accurate reporting, making them the internet news sites of the Victorian era."

"Scotland has a reputation for overcast, drizzly weather, but in Edinburgh you get the wind thrown in for free."

"He was the worst sort of gentry—the sort that mistakes the luck of birth for an actual accomplishment. As if he chose to be born into money and title and had nothing but contempt for those of us lacking the foresight to do the same."

"… I started writing it in 2010 and we weren’t as interested in stories about diversity back then. People told me I should set it in the United States, but I said no, it’s a second-generation Canadian story. It’s a unique and specific story. I wrote it anyway because it interested me. I thought, “Maybe I’ll be amusing myself at the very least.”"

"As a writer, my primary responsibility to readers is to write a story that is entertaining, and authentic. I wanted to write about characters who felt true to life, while also providing a way for readers to laugh at the foibles of others. Some of my characters are foolish, some are wise and kind, others are shallow and misguided. That’s how regular people behave too, and in fact we all cycle between many different ways of being…"

"Writing a book is so strange. You start off in one spot and end up in another. But I think when I first set out to write the book, there was a certain element of trying to right historical wrongs I saw as a voracious reader and representation of immigrants and children of immigrants…"

"…most stories about Muslims contain negative stereotypes that reinforce xenophobic, one-sided narratives that can cause real harm to vulnerable populations. I hope that more stories about Muslims, or Hindus, or Buddhists, etc., set in the West, will help readers understand immigrant communities better, but most importantly will also allow those immigrant communities to see themselves as worthy of being featured in all types of stories, not just highly politicized ones…"

"I annoy everybody, not just certain women…I think it is because I'm not interested in the group, only in the individual. What happens is my message enters the conflicted person reading it who is half self, half society but does not know where one begins and the other ends. I light up that conflict and it makes people angry."

"Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous…"

"A journalist recently told me that she had been sent to find out who I was. [...] There seems to be some problem about my identity. But no one can find it, because it’s not there—I have lost all interest in having a self. Being a person has always meant getting blamed for it."

"I worry I don't see things the way everyone else does."

"I could almost divide my life on either side of this line, between the things that are real and the things that are imitating reality and are synthetic or inauthentic, and the awful pain of being in the synthetic life or the synthetic relationship, the one that is a bit like the thing you want but is not it. So that was that book."

"Cusk herself seems extraordinary — a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish. She tramples anyone close to her, especially [second husband [[w:Adrian Clarke (photographer)|Adrian] Clarke]], whom she has forced to give up his job in order to look after the kids. She pours scorn on his "dependence" and "unwaged domesticity", but won't do chores herself because they make her feel, of all things, "unsexed". She is horrified when he demands half of every­thing in the divorce: "They’re my children," she snarls. "They belong to me.""

"I can't even remember Saving Agnes. I haven't read it in years and years. I don’t think I could read it. It's a strange thing about having been publishing for so long. As with any memory of yourself at twenty-five, it feels like your cellular being has completely changed. It's not just photographs of me with a weird hairstyle at twenty-five—a novel is such an intricate document."

"The past is not yet past. When things happen, the only way we can make sense of it is by telling the story about the past – realising where prejudices come from. And the point would be not only to spin a story about racial violence but to tell how our ancestors have bravely and creatively overcome these things."

"Canada, in fact, has had its own legacies of slavery, segregation, state violence, and systemic impoverishment; and Canada, no less than any other site of the African diaspora, boasts brilliant affirmations of Black life and creativity, powerfully “here,” but in complex intercultural and diasporic dialogue with the world."

"I’m often inspired by the everyday beauty and resilience of black and brown families caught up in deeply challenging circumstances. I wanted to capture this ordinary beauty in its variations and intensity."