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November 1, 2002
Head-to-head with the boys
Female author dishes out Jewish storytelling to rival any male
writers.
KATHARINE HAMER SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
In recognition of Jewish Book Month in November, the Bulletin
features an interview with writer Linda Grant.
Quick. Think of the pantheon of great Jewish writers. Saul Bellow?
Check. Philip Roth? Yup. Mordecai Richler? Who else could have made
Barney Panofsky such a lovable mensch? But there are few women writers
to compare, few who so winningly commit to print the hysterical
minutiae of Jewish family life. One stands out: Linda Grant.
Born in Liverpool, England, in 1951 to Polish and Russian Jewish
immigrants, Grant is more than equipped to go head-to-head with
those chroniclers of chaos. Onstage at the Vancouver International
Writer's Festival last weekend, she was ready to wade into the fray
during a discussion about humanity, conflict and identity, as she
continuously adjusted the hem of her skirt. She is a woman who,
like the headstrong heroine Alix Rebick in her latest novel Still
Here (Little, Brown, $22.95) can't sit still.
As a novelist and a journalist, Grant is a writer who delves passionately
into the subjects that interest her – all representative of
women's interests at both a personal and political level. She has
written about the feminist movement (Sexing the Millennium: A
Political History of the Feminist Revolution) and her mother's
descent into dementia (the devastatingly poignant Tell Me Who
I Am, Again). Her last novel, When I Lived in Modern Times,
in which a young British woman seeking self-discovery in 1948 Tel-Aviv
instead finds herself utterly adrift, won the Orange Prize for fiction.
Still Here is what Grant refers to as her "most Jewish
novel." Set in present-day Liverpool, it tells the parallel
stories of Rebick, an opinionated academic, and American architect
Joseph Shields who has come to revivify the city with his new hotel.
There are family secrets and painterly descriptions of crumbling
towns and precocious interjections of middle-aged sex, for which
Grant makes no apologies.
"There is a type of Jewish woman who is somewhat larger than
life and those are the stories that I wanted to tell," she
said in an interview at the Granville Island Hotel. "In a way,
I want to write about the female equivalent of those Philip Roth
characters. There is some fine Jewish women's writing, but I want
to kind of take on the big boys in their own territory."
Grant came of age in the 1960s, and did everything she could to
deny her background.
"I was hugely in rebellion against a suburban Jewish upbringing,
which was very much one of 'you get married, you live near your
mother, you go to JNF coffee mornings,' " she recalled. "I
just wanted to be part of this Britain of the 1960s and '70s. [But]
when I came to start writing, every time I tried to write about
somebody who wasn't Jewish it seemed like ventriloquism. The way
that I could write was to write about Jewish women who felt somehow
dislocated."
A sense of otherness is something she says she has always felt.
"I don't have any sense at all of having a nationality. As
a writer, my voice is that of someone who never quite fit in anywhere."
Grant spent the late 1970s and early 1980s living and studying in
Canada, before deciding that she preferred the more "complicated"
nature of Europe. Among her many journalistic ventures was a journey
back to Poland, her father's homeland, where she encountered a bizarre
twist on the notion of identity in a place where all attempts at
recreating a Jewish community are being carried out by Americans
seeking repatriation two generations down.
"I think the creepiest thing that happened the whole time I
was in Poland was in Krakow, where they had a Jewish neighborhood
with a lot of synagogues in it, and this is like a theme park –
it's a Jewish theme park with no Jews. So there are these Jewish
restaurants, none of which are kosher, serving Jewish food, served
by Poles, with Yiddish songs being sung by somebody from Switzerland,
this woman, who had long straight blonde hair and skinny little
hips and she comes out and starts singing Sophie Tucker. I felt
such a sense of this country where some ingredient had been removed
from the recipe, as if you'd made the lemon meringue pie without
the meringue. There was something seriously missing and they were
trying to recreate it in ways that were just exceptionally odd and
misguided."
She laughed uproariously when I told her that, on my own visit to
Poland, I never made it to Auschwitz on account of a train strike,
and she gleefully recalled being sent from Auschwitz to Warsaw on
a first-class train ticket "paid for by the government of Poland,
going in the opposite direction, and I thought, 'This is alright,
I can live with this.' "
If Grant seems flippant, it's only in response to the fact that
families, including her own, have finally begun to talk about the
Holocaust. Though she lost no close family members, there was always,
she said, "that sense of shame. There was a silence, and the
silence was, 'We don't want people to think that we're the kind
of people that could have that done to them.' The attitude of my
family was one of shame about the Holocaust with one of intense
pride about Israel."
Now she worries about how the situation in Israel has sparked a
level of anti-Semitism in Europe she has never experienced. She
talks about a recent march in London against war in Iraq, "where
parts of the crowd were quite clearly chanting anti-Semitic slogans.
As an identified Jewish writer, I feel more uncomfortable than I
ever have in my life."
Grant won't be cowed, though; she has no plans to surrender her
non-conformist ideals. "There's the British side of me –
reticent, reserved, tactful, quiet, a bit stuck up – and then
there's the Jewish side, which is the opposite."
Katharine Hamer is a writer living in North Vancouver.
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