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Books: Children of the Revolution
Leah Eichler Toronto
By 8:15 every morning, novelist Nancy Richler is already seated at her regular table at her favorite Italian caf� in Vancouver, and has ordered her usual cappuccino and a glass of water.
During her time at the Calabria Caf�, Richler spends two to three hours writing the old-fashioned way -- with a pen and notepad -- while she listens to the Italian music being piped through the speakers, the whistle of the espresso machine, and the banter of customers speaking English and Italian. The noise relaxes Richler, she says, helping her concentrate by forcing her to focus her attention on her work.
This past fall, however, her seat was frequently empty, as the normally solitary writer was caught up by a whirlwind of readings and interviews across Canada to promote her second novel, "Your Mouth Is Lovely." Until recently, Richler was largely unknown, but the keen interest in the latest book, published simultaneously in Canada and the United States, has thrust her into the limelight. Rights to the novel have already been sold in France, Germany, Holland, Australia and Israel.
On the surface, it appears as though Richler was destined to write "Your Mouth Is Lovely," a poignant and engaging historical novel about a young Jewish woman locked away in a Siberian prison by the Czarist regime for her involvement in the first Russian revolution, in 1905. Her fascination with Russia has been a longstanding affair: She studied Russian language and history at the University of Denver, where she earned a master�s degree in international studies. Richler�s interest in the era intensified after she took a course on 19th-century Russian social history at the University of Colorado, where she read narratives of working men and women, whetting her appetite to create a fictional work about the daily life of ordinary people of the time.
What�s more, her mother�s family comes from Russia, having moved to Montreal in 1903; Richler has always been fascinated by the thought of those who were left behind.
The name Richler connotes fiction in Canada, where the late Mordecai is an icon, and a couple of his own children, Daniel and Emma, have evolved into well-known authors in their own right. However, Nancy Richler is only distantly related to, and in fact never met, the author of "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" and "Solomon Gursky Was Here."
The seed of inspiration for "Your Mouth Is Lovely" -- the title is taken from a line in Song of Songs -- sprung from the story of Richler�s own birth. Several hours before her delivery, Nancy�s paternal grandfather died, forcing her family�s initial joy to be mixed with grief, she explained to The Report, in a phone interview. Through the years, she often thought about her father�s emotional state on that day and throughout the first week of her life, since he sat shivah and observed the laws of mourning during his newborn�s first few days.
With her own story in mind, Richler sat down and wrote a three-page outline about a woman�s happiness being mired in grief. But as she wrote and rewrote the story, she realized that the voice she was hearing was neither hers nor her father�s at all. Rather, it belonged to a 19th-century woman, named Miriam, who dreams of the daughter she has not seen since she was taken from her at birth.
"I had no idea I was going to be writing a historical novel," says Richler of the early pages of her book. But as her protagonist writes early in the narrative, destruction can give birth to creation, and as in Richler�s own case, a tragedy was punctuated by the joy of childbirth.
"Your Mouth Is Lovely" opens in the Siberian prison where Miriam, a young Jewish woman, has already languished through six years of a life sentence for shooting an officer. Miriam begins by writing a letter to her daughter, who was born before Miriam�s banishment to Siberia, and adopted by the mother�s aunt, who has subsequently emigrated to Montreal.
Miriam starts her narrative by relating the tragic circumstances of her own start in life -- her mother committed suicide while she was an infant and her father, Aaron Lev, gave her to the local midwife to be raised. As a young girl, she is summoned back to her father�s house after he remarries a complex and intelligent dressmaker named Tsila, who tells Miriam in no uncertain terms that she does not intend to replace the girl�s mother. Instead, she diligently cares for and educates Miriam, assuring her that knowledge will serve her better than any surrogate mother.
Throughout the novel, Richler captures the small, impoverished Jewish village in the Pripet marshes that straddle modern Belarus and Ukraine, where her characters live religiously observant lives often colored by a strong dose of superstition and where the imminent threat of their gentile neighbors grows loudly in the background.
Preoccupied by her mother�s death and rumors about the identity of her true father, Miriam decides to reject the life otherwise laid out for her in the shtetl and runs away to Kiev at age 16, under the pretense that she�s searching for her aunt, Bayla, who has disappeared with her fianc�. In Kiev, Miriam secures a factory job and is drawn in to the prevalent unrest among the working class.
After she finally finds Bayla, who has turned into a determined agitator against the regime of Czar Nicholas II, Miriam finds herself becoming an unwitting participant in the revolution.
For years, Richler felt drawn to the topic of the revolution, which began after a peaceful demonstration was violently quashed by Nicholas�s troops. The revolt instigated a backlash by anti-revolutionary groups, who responded with violent attacks on socialists and pogroms against Jews. Though the revolution convinced the czar to institute reforms, they were too little, too late, and the subsequent Communist revolution toppled the monarch 12 years later.
Richler felt particularly drawn to the women involved in the uprising, who often were bucking accepted social mores to focus on their cause. As an openly lesbian woman who grew up in an Orthodox home in the Montreal suburbs, the 45-year-old author knows first-hand the challenges that face a woman from a traditional background who chooses a less conventional path.
Richler grew up in C�te Saint-Luc, a largely Jewish suburb of Montreal, where she attended a Jewish day school and an Orthodox synagogue every Saturday. "It was your standard, 1970s, suburban, Jewish-Canadian upbringing," Richler recalls. "Ours was a very observant home and our lives revolved around Judaism." The Richlers were so ensconced in Jewish life and traditions that the author found it easy to conjure up the old shtetls of Eastern Europe by recalling her family life and the workings of her own community.
"You can hear a lot of my mother�s voice in the novel, in terms of rhythm and cadences, though not the content," she explains. "I felt a lot of what got passed down to me was not verbal but a lot of the traditions were inside me. I took the traditions and observances and translated them into words and things."
But as a lesbian, Richler had to create her own way of integrating Judaism into her life. "I didn�t get married, raise children the Orthodox, traditional way," says Richler, who has lived with her partner, Vicki Trerise, for 15 years, "and yet I consider myself deeply Jewish -- as much as anyone living a more traditional life. I�m not your standard product from that environment, so I wanted to write about women who were outside the norm."
To research the novel, Richler read memoirs from the era and turn-of-the-century guidebooks to the Russian Empire geared toward English travelers, in particular, material on Kiev. But she also turned to Jewish texts for inspiration, and found herself becoming more aware and interested in certain Jewish rituals, such as the cycle of Hebrew months, for the first time in years.
"I would read parashat hashavua [the weekly Torah portion] every Friday night just to get into the rhythm that I thought my character would be in and the Tzena Urena [compilations of midrashic commentary on the weekly parshah], which Jewish women used to read alongside the weekly portion, so I would be immersed in the world my character was used to being in," Richler explains. She also turned to contemporary narratives, such as Simon Solomon�s "My Jewish Roots," Mary Sukloff�s "The Life Story of a Russian Exile" and Boris Savinkov�s "Memoirs of a Terrorist."
Although Richler admits that she related to the protagonist in many ways, she was more drawn to the character of Bayla, Miriam�s aunt who runs away to Kiev to join in the failed revolution, sacrificing her happiness for politics. "I was sympathetic to Bayla because she spent so much of her youth waiting for her life to ignite and not realizing that the life she was living was her life already. I have great sympathy for that mindset. I think many people suffer from it -- waiting for their life to begin as each precious day is passing."
Richler�s first book, a mystery novel called "Throwaway Angels," differs greatly from her current one in both setting and style. Set against the real-life backdrop of a wave of disappearances of prostitutes in Vancouver in the early 1990s, the work focuses on a laundromat manager, Tova, who goes in search of her closest friend, a stripper, after she vanishes.
"�Throwaway Angels� was written in the early 90s, when women in Vancouver were disappearing at an alarming rate, but there seemed to be no alarm whatsoever, because the women were sex-trade workers. The non-reaction of the city was completely shocking and horrifying to me," recounts Richler, adding that although the settings of the two novels are different, the underlying concerns are similar. Both books deal with people who are marginalized in their respective societies, and that lesser status, at times, proves to be dangerous, even lethal. Both sets of characters struggle with the question of how far they can go to improve the social conditions that imperil their lives. (In the real-life case, in Vancouver, where more than 60 women disappeared, most of them from the mid-1990s to 2001, a man has been charged with 15 counts of murder. If convicted, he will be the worst serial killer in Canadian history.)
Although Richler grew up fond of certain Jewish authors, especially Isaac Bashevis Singer, she cites one particular novel by a gentile for helping her finish "Your Mouth Is Lovely," on which she labored nearly five years.
During her second year of writing, Richler read "A Fine Balance," by Rohinton Mistry, a Bombay-born Canadian writer whose "Family Matters" was shortlisted for the U.K.�s 2002 Man Booker Prize. "�A Fine Balance� taught me to develop the book and not to rush it. I thought, he�s taken the time to develop these characters; I just need to take my time and ease into this.... My first novel was more terse and contained. With this, I allowed myself to open up and follow."
Set in the mid-1970s in India, Mistry�s book grapples with a similar theme about living in the face of political turmoil and despair. In Richler�s novel, Miriam and her cohorts in prison learn to adapt to their circumstances. Her despair is made tolerable by the story she writes for her daughter, the product of her solitary sexual encounter. Yet, Miriam hopes her daughter will never read the pages she diligently pens, since the truth of the events and her motives cannot be accurately committed to paper. The heart, Richler reminds us throughout the novel, is not something that another can truly penetrate.
Leah Eichler is a Toronto-based writer currently working on a novel.
February 24, 2003
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