A range of quality in novels

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

Originally published in Hebrew in Israel in 2006, Aharon Appelfeld’s Blooms of Darkness: A Novel has just been put out by Schocken Books. Two other books received by the Independent were also released previously: Sara Houghteling’s Pictures at an Exhibition (Vintage Books), in the United States in 2009, and Shattering Glass by Nancy-Gay Rotstein in 1996, with a new Canadian edition by Overlook Duckworth last year. All are welcome reads, but not every one is a keeper.

In Blooms of Darkness, Appelfeld covers familiar ground: a child’s experience of the Holocaust. In this story, Hugo, an eleven-year-old boy, survives by hiding in the closet of a prostitute, Mariana. His mother places him there after more and more Jews are deported from the ghetto and she’s afraid that he will be next – his father has already been taken to a labor camp; his mother will try to find a hiding place in a nearby village.

Hugo’s imagination and memories help him pass the hours of solitude. He listens to the comings and goings of Mariana’s clients, including German soldiers, and to Mariana’s tantrums, and he’s there to comfort Mariana, who is often despondent. The two develop a close relationship.

When the Russians arrive, Mariana is arrested as a Nazi collaborator and Hugo is once more alone with his memories. As he encounters other refugees, Hugo is reminded of a house of mourning, when his grandfather died.

“‘Why are the people so quiet?’ he asked his mother then.

“‘What is there to say?’ she replied, and said nothing more.”

Silence plays a large role in Appelfeld’s writing, but, as tragic-filled as it often is, it allows room for hope and, while Blooms of Darkness is full of sadness, there are glimmers of light. And it is, of course, extremely well written.

***

Although didactic at times, Houghteling’s Pictures at an Exhibition is an intriguing story based on both real events in Paris during the 1930s and ’40s, and real people, though the main protagonist, Max Berenzon, is fictional.

The book begins with Max reflecting on his life and providing some of his family’s background. His grandfather, Abraham, inherited an artists’ supply store and artists – the likes of Renoir and Pissarro – paid their bills in paintings on occasion. “When the value of a painting exceeded the price of its paint,” writes Houghteling, “Abraham sold it and invested the money....” These initial investments soon led to other business ventures, and the Berenzons became wealthy, with Max’s father, Daniel, inheriting Abraham’s paintings when he died, and opening a gallery.

There is nothing Max wants more than to be his father’s assistant, but a poor memory and an over-attachment to the paintings prevent that, and Max settles for medical school. Meanwhile, his father hires a young woman, Rose Clément, a character based on Rose Valland, a French woman whose detailed recording of the Nazis’ theft of Jewish-owned art allowed for thousands of paintings to be repatriated.

In the novel, when the Nazis take over Paris, the Berenzons flee the city and survive the war in hiding, but Houghteling doesn’t go into those years. She picks up the story in 1944, when Max and his father return to Paris to find the gallery gutted and the paintings stolen. She follows Max’s almost impossible quest to recover his father’s collection, while also trying to reconnect with Rose.

As with Appelfeld’s Blooms of Darkness, Houghteling’s Pictures at an Exhibition is more bleak than hopeful, yet it, too, highlights people who risked their lives to help others and it, too, offers possibility. Houghteling ends her novel with an actual account of Valland’s – and others’ – efforts to track down Nazi-looted art. Although she relates that “some 40,000 art objects remain unknown,” she notes, “Today, no major museum is untouched by the burden of proving the wartime provenance of its holdings.... Laudably, over the past decade, private and national museums have grown more transparent about this question of provenance and wartime history.”

***

While not in the same category as Blooms of Darkness and Pictures at an Exhibition, Shattering Glass is an entertaining read. A much-published poet, Rotstein’s use of language is at times innovative – when she describes a hotel lobby “[d]isguised with its fine leather wing chairs and cushioned sofas as an elegant salon,” for example – and sometimes out of place in a serious novel, such as in a love scene, when one of her characters, “welcomed his body to her, its press lithe upon her, his warmth a release from her solitude.”

Rotstein shares with readers the lives of three seemingly successful women: Judy, a lawyer; Dede, the wife of an up-and-coming politician; and Barbara, a novelist. Under the very thin surface, however, their lives are a mess, with their respective children suffering from their mother’s neglect, and all of the fathers being horrible people.

Perhaps because Rotstein went to law school later in life and actually became a lawyer, as does her character of Judy, this first story is the most authentic. The other characters ring somewhat hollow, especially Dede, and the meeting of all three women in the book’s fourth and final section is too contrived – though the dialogue is realistic.

Rotstein doesn’t succeed in writing a stellar piece of fiction, but she does touch upon some serious issues in an accessible way, such as how success is defined in society for men and women, as well as a broken legal system, domestic violence, drugs and child abuse.

About why she wrote the book, Rotstein says on her website, “I talked with many women who you and I would consider successful.... It was that common thread in what they were saying that led me to what I’ve come to identify as the ‘shattering glass’ phenomenon: that although we can see our success in terms of career achievements outside the home, we continue, as did our mothers and grandmothers before us, to think of ourselves as failures when we have any difficulties or problems in our personal lives. This kind of thinking limits us and sabotages our feelings of success. Women need to shatter those negative images. I believe that identifying the inconsistent standards by which we judge ourselves is crucial.”

Rotstein manages to identify some of those standards in Shattering Glass, but she doesn’t offer an alternative vision. Of all the criticisms that could be said of this book, this is its fatal flaw.

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