In Praise of Playing the Piano Badly

 After a 39 year interval, I am taking piano lessons again. My goal is to play some songs for my students, and to learn how to count. Although my teacher Kim tells me I am making excellent progress, my playing sounds wooden, and nothing like music. It doesn’t really matter; mostly I play as meditation. 

I started playing the school year before COVID as a way to deal with work stress. Although I had taught at the same rural school just outside Kingston for years, my school, and my job changed dramatically in 2019. For the ten years prior that I had taught there, and according to many parents at the school, who had also attended back in the day, the neighbourhood of 1950’s brick bungalows never seemed to change. Then, in the fall of 2019, a new housing development was built nearby and our school population ballooned in a short time. Many of my new students came from at-risk families living in poverty. Suddenly, I had significantly more students who struggled with food security. Our school also saw a rapid rise in students coping with anxiety and depression. And, we also saw a sharp increase in children whose parents suffered from addiction. Many of those children had experienced trauma as a result. While we previously had a food-sharing program at the school, we now also sent one student home with food over the weekends. At Christmas I tried to purchase enough non-perishable items to help the family get through the holidays. 

Teaching children who live with unpredictability makes for unpredictable classrooms. My French lessons often didn’t go as planned and sometimes my back-up lessons needed their own back-up plans. Many days I spent more time dealing with complex behaviours than I did teaching French. I left school at the end of each day exhausted. 

When I got home, shell-shocked from the day, I’d sit in my living room and try to play my piano. It didn't matter how terrible I was. The concentration required to coordinate my hands, and if I was feeling ambitious, the pedals, emptied my brain of school thoughts. I couldn't think about students and butcher “Lean On Me,” at the same time. And, when I was finished banging out the chords to Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting for You,” I was ready to tackle dinner and conversations with my own pre-teens. 

That year I was writing my YA book, Cleaning Up, that came out this spring. The protagonist Jess, who cleans houses for a summer job develops an imaginary friendship with a girl whose room she cleans. Jess was like many of my at-risk students from the 2019 school year. She ate from the snack bin at school and struggled to show her emotions because of experienced trauma. She was a child who scanned her father’s arms for track marks. Jess wasn’t any specific student, but she reflected a growing number of children I’d taught in Ontario schools. 

As my day job leaked into my writing, I realized Jess needed an outlet other than cleaning houses and fantasizing about rich girls. I wrote her new friends who had a band. Jess sang backup, and like me, learned how to play the piano. Jess also played poorly, but it didn’t matter. As she made her way through “Hot Cross Buns,” or Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” music became a way forward, away from busy thoughts toward calm. It was important to me that Jess have not only a financial way forward, and new social experiences, but also an outlet for her stress. 

These days I have a new teaching position in a French Immersion program. Most of my students come from middle-class families, play hockey, take swimming lessons and vacation at Disney World. Like their counterparts at other schools, they struggle with anxiety and ADHD, but few worry about food security. Mostly I teach ten-year-olds, but I’m also responsible for art and music to a grade one class. Each day we dance, pretend to be animals, paint penguins and sing. Mostly we sing in French, but sometimes I take them across the hall to an empty classroom with an old piano. The kids sit on the floor and for a special treat, we sing in English. I don’t have a lot of piano repertoire for children yet, but I’ve taught them to warble the few songs I know how to play. And so we sing,  Lean on me, when you’re not strong, and I’ll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on. 

And everyone feels better when we’re done. 

Music for everyone!

Hiking in the Himalayas in 1998

Next week my husband Rob’s two best friends, John and James, will come to our cottage north of Kingston, ON for the week. I’ve known them for twenty-five years, ever since I met my husband when he was backpacking with them in Dharmsala, India. The three of them travelled with a guitar and played Beatles songs and other hits from the 70’s, as well as songs they wrote themselves. Meals in simple cafés frequently turned into concerts with Tibetan waiters warbling along to Stones’ tunes. It was a heady way to travel, and those songs formed the backdrop to my falling in love with Rob.

In the years since our India trip James and John have come up to our cottage to play those old songs and write some new ones. James, a retired teacher with a romantic bent favors James Taylor and Sandy Denny tunes. John is more of the Johnny Cash/Fred Eaglesmith enthusiast and has been known to write songs poking fun at my husband’s attempt to find me in India, his obsession with Indian motorcycles and other country-influenced songs. 

John and Rob write the latest cottage hit. 

 During our week together the guys will write new songs, plan a potential trip to Nashville and fantasize about touring. Also, old songs the guys wrote themselves during our trip to India will be sung. I crafted the lyrics to a few of these songs. I can still distinctly remember the heady excitement of coming up with lyrics that expressed how I was feeling about being in love with someone not Jewish – and then having James turn them into music. The lyrics to the song I wrote, The Ocean, feel a little too on the nose to me now, but they expressed exactly how I felt in 1998. 

Love always seems a sacrifice to me 

caught between you and my family 

words that cross my lips sound insane 

Sometimes culture is hard to explain 

A few months later, when Rob and I temporarily went our own ways and wondered if we could sustain a relationship that faced the challenges of not only cultural differences but a significant age gap, Rob sent me a mixed tape that included The Ocean, but also a new song, Time Has It’s Way, that James had composed from letters Rob had written to me. 

Time has its way with me 

But it hasn't diminished my longing for you 

I have played the strong lead 

Supporting you as best as I can 

As I travel around this lonely land 

And take on a role I just don't understand 

And wonder in my soul about the whole circumstance 

I find I'm still caring for you. 

John, Rob and James on the dock, with Dassa

These songs not only let me express the complicated feelings of my youth, but also provided the experience of being part of a musical collaboration. I could barely sing, and I couldn’t play an instrument, but I could be a lyricist.

I have closer friends than James and John, but with no one else do I have this musical connection that results in my words becoming music. 

 James, John and Rob have written a lot of songs over the years. A few of them are excellent, some of them, like a song entitled Garbage Truck, are just for fun. A few years ago the four of us wrote a song called Saturday Night. It wasn’t a particularly deep or meaningful song. We wrote throw-away lyrics like, We’ll go dancing Saturday night/and if we do it’ll be all right. The slightly more meaningful verses were about the challenges of being in a relationship, a theme discussed often among us. The lyrics were recorded in a journal, sung a few times, then largely forgotten. 

 Then, when I was writing my newest book, Cleaning Up, I decided to look at the song again. 

 Cleaning Up is about a girl named Jess who has a summer job cleaning a country house in the Westport area. Jess, who comes from an impoverished background, has been so intent on school and part-time jobs to try and improve her life that she hasn’t made a lot of friends. However the summer she lives in Westport she becomes friends with a guy named Matt when they bond over their mutual interest in growing vegetables. Matt is also in a band and convinces Jess to play tambourine on a few songs. For Jess, being in a band is a new sense of belonging, both to a group of friends, and also a musical community. Music enables her to see the possibilities of her life in ways beyond escaping poverty. Jess even has the chance to perform with the band’s signature song, We’ll Go Dancing Saturday Night. I used the lyrics with permission from the song I wrote with Rob, John and James. 

Cleaning Up is about learning to be who you are, and also about using music to forge relationships and enrich your life. I wanted Jess to have a future rich with friendship and music. 

 I hope you all have music in your lives, whether you sing or play an instrument, or are merely a good listener. The world always needs good listeners.

 

This past week I was in beautiful Vancouver visiting family and launching my book Cleaning Up. When speaking to a Vancouver crowd about the book’s setting of Kingston, ON, I realized I have lived in Kingston for 17 years, almost as long as I ever lived in Vancouver. 

 

I spoke to the audience about living and teaching in the Kingston area and read a section about the book’s protagonist, Jess, cleaning in the Westport area. The house Jess cleans in is actually based on a real house that I stayed in many years ago, The Stepping Stone Inn, located near Westport, ON.

I loved The Stepping Stone Inn’s beautiful 1830’s limestone exterior, wide-plank floors, peaked roof and the jacuzzi tubs in the bedrooms. Since my husband and I were the only guests staying so late in the fall season, we were able to prowl around the house and gardens.

The house somehow stayed in my head and became a key setting for Cleaning Up. I kept the location and look of the house the same – that 1830’s peaked roof and wide front porch – but changed parts of the garden and interior to make the house less like an inn and more like a private residence. I kept a picture of the house on my computer desktop to remind me of the setting.

While researching the house I learned it was actually a historic home, The David Laidlaw House. The house was built between 1849-1852, by David Laidlaw, a Scottish immigrant in The Rideau Cottage style, which features one-and a-half stories, two chimneys and stone lintels over the windows.

Many readers, including myself, love reading books where they know the location and can imagine themselves in the same locations as the character in a book. So, for those of you who know the Westport area, now you can imagine Quinn Gupta’s house. And for those of you not familiar with the area, here are a few pictures to help you out.

I didn't include this pond behind the house in Cleaning Up, but it's a beautiful feature of the property and I'm sure Jess would have loved the landscape challenges it would present to a gardener. 

This barn isn't on the property of the David Laidlaw house, but it's what I envisioned as the barn where Matt lives behind the Gupta house. 

Gardening for Hope

Spring is slowly coming to Ontario. Each day I stand in my very damp
garden and hope. I hope the peony that looks totally dead will come back and that the alliums won’t completely take over the front beds. I
hope the squirrels haven’t eaten all the tulip bulbs and that my hydrangeas come back. I am truly a terrible, lackadaisical gardener, and hope is all I have. 

Gardening, planting little seeds that look like rocks in dirt, is truly a hopeful act. We plan, but mostly we wait and see and hope.

 

All this hoping can be a religious act too. Recently I had the opportunity to attend a Baptist service in Harlem, New York for Easter Sunday. It was a tremendous experience with a rocking gospel choir, two organs, a contemporary dance performance and a lot of ‘ah-mens’ and ‘yesses.’ I was deeply moved by Reverend S. Raschaad Hoggard’s sermon. As a Jew I know very little about Jesus or Easter and the violence of the crucifixion has always worried me. Yet Reverend Hoggard explained that the resurrection is a message of hope because despite his death, Jesus rose again. Whether you believe in the resurrection or not, the idea that those who stand against injustice, hate and violence will always rise is tremendously powerful. As Reverend Hoggard said, “When the resurrection is alive in our hearts, hope and love have the last word.” 

My novel, Cleaning Up, which came out last week, is also about hope and gardening. Jess, the main character, learns to plant seeds at school from her beloved teacher, Mrs. M. To Jess, who struggles with poverty, so many things in life are disappointing, but plants – growing blossoming green things from hard little kernels in dirt – blows Jess’s mind. To Jess who struggles with food security, the ability to grow things that are beautiful and can be eaten is astonishing. 

Gardening is also a way for Jess to invest in her future. She plans to study landscape design, get a job creating beautiful spaces, and end the endemic poverty that surrounds her. Planting and growing things are a radical act of hope for Jess. 

Jess also loves the book The Secret Garden

by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I loved this book too as a child, and I was taken with it as an adult when I read it to my sons a few years ago. Young Mary, orphaned in India, is
sent to an uncle in Yorkshire to live in Misselthwaite Manor a large, unfriendly house. There she finds a secret garden that needs to be brought back to life. Through the garden she finds happiness and also heals her sick cousin Colin. 

Jess re-reads The Secret Garden when she’s stressed and when she doubts her future. She has her own imaginary secret garden that she retreats to in her head. Both the gardens are places of solace and transformation. They are a way to keep hope alive. 

And that’s what we all need – to to sit in our Easter Friday pain for awhile – but then not let despair take over. Just like Reverend Hoggard said, hope and love have to have the last word.

It's Almost Here!

 My next YA book is almost ready for the world! Cleaning Up will be available this April from Groundwood Books. I have lots of exciting things planned to promote the book coming up this spring. Mostly importantly, I hope Kingston friends will join me at Novel Idea on April 20th for my launch. I'll also be on Global Kingston TV and in Canadian Teacher magazine in the fall. 

I haven't seen the actual book yet, but I am very excited by the cover, which was designed by Charlotte Day. Here's a sneak peek about the book. 

Jess finds a secret diary and imagines what it would be like to be a girl who has everything. Will she become so wrapped up in someone else’s life that she misses a chance to create her own?

Jess cleans houses to save money for college, because her dad — unemployed and off the wagon yet again — has moved the two of them out of the city into a decrepit borrowed tent and trailer. Jess wavers between anger at her father and fear that poverty and addiction may be her fate, too, and she decides she will do whatever it takes to avoid it.

She gets a gig cleaning a gorgeous country home and discovers the trashed bedroom of the teenaged daughter, Quinn. Jess wonders how a girl with a perfect life – private school, horseback riding – could have wrecked such a beautiful room. As she cleans, she finds troubling clues – including, tucked behind the bed, a diary.

Gradually Jess learns that Quinn’s life is not what it’s supposed to be. Jess begins to imagine becoming friends with Quinn, and when she begins to write down a new story for Quinn, she risks turning her back on the opportunities that are right in front of her – new friends, new interests, a fresh beginning.

Gratitude

This week all the Lieberman-Smiths went back to school. There was some grumbling after being off a record seven months, but I am slowly adjusting.  Despite some morning grumpiness I am incredibly thankful for having a great teaching job, and for my MANY new students. (I think my school doubled in size during my absence.) I found this gratitude list I wrote awhile back and thought I would share it with you. It's a  nice way to think about the amazing things we have in our lives... and it's alphabetized.  

I Am Thankful For: 
A- Ace Granary bread, AIM Langugage Learning

B- Bubbie, the colour blue, backpacks, biking, books, Before Sunrise etc, bagel

 brunches

C- my cottage, coffee, canoeing, chicken soup
D- Dassa, dogs, drawing, duvets
E- Elephants, Ethan Hawke
F- Feminists, French
G- Galiano Island
H- my hair, hiking, Hebrew School, hand-me-downs
I - India, immigration
J- Jews, Jerusalem, Japan, John and James, Jeff
K- Kugel, Knaidle, Knish, Knishbroit, Kingston, Keatings
L- Liebermans, letters
M- Makaio, Montreal bagel, Marilyn Robinsons’s novels, Morgan, marzipan, matza balls, my sister Marcy
N- Nancy, novels, The New Yorker
O- Ottolenghi cookbooks, Ondaatje’s books, Orca Publishing
P- pianos, Pan Chancho, Poetry in the woods, Prince Edward Country
Q- the letter Q in Scrabble
R- Robbie (both of them), rooiboos tea

S- summer, French teaching guru Sylvia Duckworth, my physiotherapist   

     Stacey, my stand-up paddle board, socialized medicare, skiing, sushi, 

     swimming, scotch

T- Trek
U- underwear
V- Volkswagons, Vancouver
W- my white writing couch, White Lady Cocktails
Y- yoga
Z- Zeydi

If you feel inspired to write your own gratitude list, send it my way. 
~Leanne 

Winter Reading

Dear Readers, 

This blog is going on temporary haitus. Instead of blogging here about books and reading, I am going on a five month 'Shabbatical' with my family to travel in Asia and the Middle East. If you'd like to follow me on that blog, send me an email. In the mean time, I'll leave you with some of favourite book recommendations from my 2018/2019 winter break. We moved out of our house over the break, which was a tremendous amount of work, but once we were established in our temporary home, I read some amazing books. 

I adored Women Talking by Miriam Toews. It's what I feel fiction should be right now, a book that reflects on the lives of women and their experiences with rape culture. (I don't really think all books should be about this, but you know when a book speaks to what you're thinking about at a particular moment? That was this book.) Women Talking is based on a real and terrible occurrence at a Mennonite colony in Bolivia where women and young girls were drugged and raped during the night by men from their own community. In Toews' fictional version, a group of women come together over two days to decide to stay and fight, or to leave the community. Their conversation is fraught, but also sometimes funny, and ranges from the practical to the deeply philosophical. Toews isn't afraid to write what women really want - to experience God without male interpretation, to be educated, nor does she shy away from fascinating discussions of God, faith and the soul.

I stayed up way too late, completely engrossed in Women Talking, and I was happy for a lighter read next, French Exit by Patrick deWitt. In this story a dysfunctional mother and son move from New York to Paris to burn through the last  of their dwindling fortune. The novel, billed as a tragic-comedy of manners, is full of delightfully odd characters: psychics and talking reincarnated cats. Moreover, I appreciated the witty dialogue. 

Next I read Machine Without Horses by Helen Humphries. I love all of her books, almost unconditionally, and Humphries' The Lost Garden, is one of my favourite reads of all time. I come back to this book because the idea of a lost or secret garden is my idea of the greatest romance. I love the idea of finding a space that someone else planned and needs to be brought back to life. I also love the way Humphries writes about tragedies such as the bombing of Coventry in World World Two, in such quiet, but emotional prose. 

In Machine Without Horses, Humphries writes a fictional story of the real-life salmon fly-dresser Megan Boyd. Boyd, who was famously private and lived a quiet life in Scotland in a bare-bones cottage, was renowned for her beautiful salmon flies. While Humphries writes a compelling version of the imagined life of Boyd, it is the first part of the novel where a novelist, perhaps Humphries herself, plans out the novel that I found especially interesting. The novelist takes salmon fly-dressing lessons, walks along a river with her dog, mourns the loss of five of her family and close friends to cancer and thinks about how to write a novel about a quiet person. 

Figuring out how to tell a story is something I do a lot, and Humphries addresses all the issues I've been thinking about in the last few years as I've worked on both my memoir, Searching for Buddha, Finding Bob, and a historical novel about a governess in India who doesn't want to live a conventional Victorian life, The Bird Girls. Who is telling the story? Will the narrative unfold in the past or the present? What is the emotional underpinning that drives the book?  I was fascinated to read about Humphries (or a fictional author's) thinking about those choices and then read how she chose to execute them. With very few known details about Boyd's life Humphries manages to write a full and moving account of a woman's life. 

While I was reading downstairs, my son was quietly devouring his own book upstairs. I gave him a copy of Rainbow Rowell's Carry On over the winter break, but wasn't sure he would read it. "It's like Harry Potter, but not like Harry Potter," I said, "and there's gay kissing." He nodded, okay, and was immediatly drawn into the story the way I had been. I had picked up the book a  little reluctantly a few months ago. I wanted to read more Rainbow Rowell, but was a little Harry Potter'ed out. I read most of the series out loud to my younger son a few years ago, which is a A LOT of reading aloud. My son was so engaged in the book he would press everyone into reading- his dad, babysitters, cousins, and so I was frequently confused, having missing key chapters. My sons were always yelling at me about how could I not know x or y. Also, the violence at the end was off-putting to me. 

I knew about Carry On through my favourite-so-far Rowell novel, Fangirl. The main character in this story writes Harry Potter-like fan fiction about a character named Simon Snow. I loved Fangirl so much, that I decided to give Carry On a try. I wasn't disappointed, and neither was my son. Simon Snow

has many of the same problems as Harry Potter. He's poor and has always lived with Muggles before coming to school. Unlike Potter, he's forced to live with his arch-enemy as a roommate, a Malfoy-like character named Baz. Rowell has multiple characters narrate the story, including the compelling Baz who has as many problems as Snow. He's a vampire, and he's in love with Simon Snow. Carry On manages to stay true to a Harry Potter-like feeling, but with much more complexity of character. Both my son and I also loved how Rowell describes what if feels like to use magic, or have magic use you.  I won't tell you anymore, but if you're a Harry Potter fan, I highly recommend Carry On. 

A Little Fiction, A Little Non- My Summer TBR

I've been accumulating summer reading material like libraries are going to be closed. They won't of course, and I won't be out of town for that long, but I love to plan out my cottage reading list. This year is a mix - a little fiction, a little non, some books by women, some by men, some mighty tomes and slimmer volumes too. It's all very North-American- I'll have to work on that for next year. 


I devoured two of these books already in between cycling and cleaning at my cottage. I read Rachel Kusk's Kudos in my hammock while wearing a wet bathing suit. to keep cool in the 39+ Celsius weather. Like all of Kusk's trilogy, I devoured the book, but remembered very little of it when I was done. The novel is about a women who goes to a writer's festival and meets all kinds of interesting people who monologue to her about their lives and philosophies. Having read all three books I'm not sure what my take away is, but somehow I don't care. There's something about Kusk's writing that makes her books hard to put down. 



I also read Naomi Alderman's Disobedience this week. In this novel a Jewish woman, Ronit, returns to the ultra-orthodox childhood of her family upon the death of her father. She goes to stay with her cousin Dovid, only realizing that he has married her teen lover Esti. Having written about ultra-orthodox lesbians in my YA book Gravity, I was fascinated to see what happens to the women who leave orthodoxy and the women who stay. Ronit struggles with the on-going tension between the identity she was raised with and her adult self. I especially liked the way the book adresses the silence that is expected of women in this particular community and how both Ronit and Esti move out of that imposed silence.


 A film adaptation of the book just came out, and despite my better judgement, I saw the film before the book. I enjoyed comparing the two and thinking about the choices the screenwriter made in translating the book to film. The novel is far more subtle, whereas the film is dominated by a sex scene that is only mentioned in the book. Whereas the movie shows that there's no place for lesbians in orthodoxy, the book offers a more complex balance between sexuality and religion. Mostly I think the director Sebastian Leilo couldn't resist filming an explicit lesbian sex scene. I left the film with the following quandary: is it actually sexy to have someone spit in your mouth the way actress Rachel Weisz does to Rachel McAdams? A quick survey of friends confirmed what I thought: this doesn't appeal. You can watch the trailer here


I have a raft of other books I'm looking forward to reading this summer. 

I've loved everything else Michael Ondaatje has written, especially The Cat's Table and Anil's Ghost, so I'm sure I'll love Warlight too. 

Paul Auster's massive tome 4321 is apparently one story told four different ways. I've read and loved other Auster books, but mainly in French, so I'm looking forward to reading this in my first language. This book also comes with the a high approval rating from my super-reader friend Nancy. 

Also on my list is Jessmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing. I haven't read anything by Ward yet, but I've read high praises about this southern tale. I'm looking forward to her lyrical writing style. 



In non-fiction I have two titles both purchased at the Kingston Writer's Festival. I was so taken with listening to Adam Gopnik speak at the festival that I purchased his Paris to the Moon.  Gopnik describes married sex as "like civil war re-enactors; you know how it's going to turn out -no surprises- but it's still enjoyable." On a more poignant note he also said that you should never underestimate other people's insecurities. He said, "everyone's life feels like failure on the inside." I'm still thinking about that statement nine months later. It helps me through moments when I'm not sure I'll ever publish another word. 

My other non-fiction title is Glenn Dixon's Tripping the World Fantastic: A Journey Through the Music of Our Planet. I boght this for my husband for Christmas and forgot to give it to him. It has a terrible cover, but it promises to explain why music has such a powerful hold on us. Since I have been plagued with earworms thanks to my children belting out Arrogant Worm tunes, I'm curious what I can learn. The book blurb also promises to explain whale music, and why some songs give chills up our spines. 





The book I'm most looking forward to devouring is Maggie Nelson's Bluets. This slender volume of prose poems is about my absolutely favourite colour blue. I'm a little obsessed with blue - it's shown up in both my home decorating and my writing. I know very little about this book and I'm resisting reading reviews because I don't want other people's experiences of the book to shade my reading. Right now I'm happy to gaze at what I think may be the most beautiful book cover ever. Perhaps I'll let ya'll know what I think when I'm back in the fall. 

Revisiting The Book of Trees

This week I did something I've never done before. I re-read one of my already published books. Usually as soon as I'm finished a project, I never look at it again except for readings or interviews.  

I picked up The Book of Trees this week because while working on my memoir I was trying to remember why I wanted to study at a yeshiva in Israel. The book didn't prove that helpful- the protagonist Mia wants to become an orthodox Jew because her home life is so unsatisfying- she has an absent father, a distant mother and no Jewish affiliation. This couldn't be farther from my own family or Jewish experience. As I read, I remembered many things about the book. I had forgotten that Mia's childhood home was based on my friends Janet and Bill's house in the Beaches area of Toronto. Neither of them lives in that house anymore. Bill passed away almost ten years ago and Janet now lives in BC. I had also forgotten about the country and rockabilly music that Mia's family plays in the book. Mostly I had forgotten what a funny and unsuitable character for a yeshiva Mia is. She's full of teenage angst and sexual desire and her attempts to fit into a religious world are fraught from the second she gets to Israel. 

I hadn't forgotten about the political realities that form this book, how Mia learns that many of the forests in Israel were planted over former Palestinian villages, and how Mia's political understanding of Palestinian oppression undoes her religious yearnings. I re-read many parts of the book in light of the news about the opening of the American embassy in Jerusalem last week, and the resulting violence in Gaza.  The New York Times podcast, The Daily reported two views of the embassy opening: Netanyahu's jubilant speech, and then the political reality of the violent suppression of Palestinian protest. Despite my rule against crying while driving, I couldn't help tearing up as I listened. I want Israel to be something it clearly is not: a place where my religious heritage is lived to its peaceful fullness, not an apartheid state where one's religious fulfilment only comes with the oppression of another. 

Throughout the week my Facebook feed filled up with Israel/Palestinian stories, most of them sensitive to the Palestinian plight. I felt relieved and vindicated, and less alone as a Jew, until I reminded myself that this wasn't indicative of how the Jewish world really felt. It's so easy to surround ourselves with our own opinions on social media that the few well-written, but supportive of Israel posts stuck out as treasonous diatribes, despite their careful wording and sensitivity. 

One post in my feed that caught my attention, was a link to an article on The Conversation by my friend Dorit Naaman, a Film and Media professor at Queen's University. Naaman is the director of the film Jerusalem, We Are Here, an interactive documentary that digitally re-inscribes Palestinians into the Jerusalem neighbourhoods they were evicted from in 1948.
Naaman's film reminds us of the 750,000 Palestinians who were evicted from their homes during The Nakhba, or catastrophe, and who by Israeli law do not have the right to return. Most Israelis who live in former Arab houses in Jerusalem, Haifa and Jaffa know nothing of the former inhabitants. Naaman's film attempts to fix this. "I realize that if we - as Israelis- do not face the past and remedy its wrongs, we will have no future," Naaman says. Israel is slowly moving toward a One State solution, and the only way toward reconciliation, Naaman writes, is through acknowledgement and compensation. 
The Book of Trees hasn't sold many copies. It received an icy reception in the Jewish publishing world, and even friends weren't always sure how to respond. One 'friend' said she wouldn't read it at all, that any criticism of Israel was anti-Semitic. I think my (non-Jewish) publisher was brave to take on the book, and didn't realize how unpopular the conclusions are that Mia comes to about the narrative of Jewish return. Mia wants Israel to be the culmination of everything she's learned about Judaism, but she can't help feeling that her own return is at the expense of other people who actually live on the land. 

It's a little odd to feel nostalgic or regretful about a book written more than ten years ago, but I still have secret hopes that somewhere Jewish teens are reading it and reconsidering their perceptions about Zionism. I hope that maybe they're getting a more balanced view of Israel and the moral obligations of being a nation. 

Birds, Brothers and Camp: A Few Canadian Titles

One of my reading goals this year was to read more Canadian Fiction. I recently read three very different, but excellent titles. The first, David Chariandy's Brother is set alternately in the present and in 1980's Scarborough. When Michael, a young man who works at a dead-end job at a grocery store and takes cares of his mother, is visited by his teenage girlfriend Aisha, the story dips into the past story of Michael's brother Francis. This a novel of suppressed grief, of a family undone by immigration and poverty, of parents working double or triple shifts to support a family in Canada while their "useless foreign degrees" hang framed on the walls. This is also a novel of how police behave in poor black neighbourhoods and the how the promise of a life in Canada can be undone by race and poverty. Chariandy's beautiful prose makes you read slowly and savour each word, even as the devastation of the story undoes you. 

I first came to Chariandy's work through his 2007 book Soucouyant: A Novel of Forgetting, about a young man who
returns home to care of his elderly mother suffering from dementia. Soucouyant is also beautifully written, but the novel stands out in my mind for having the best book cover ever. I love the rich blue and greens of the image, but mostly I loved the image of the over-flowing sink, the water crashing to the floor. Kudos to the designer. 

I heard about The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore on CBC's Q radio show in a segment by Jael Richardson who does Q's book pics. I don't tune into Q very often these days, but when I stumble on Richardson's recommendations I listen carefully because she always has titles I might not find myself. Richardson also chooses the kind of diverse stories that highlight different aspects of Canada that I am curious to read about.

The Lost Girls, by Kim Fu, is the story of five girls who get lost on an overnight kayaking trip from their summer camp. As a writer I read for plot and language, but I'm also endlessly curious how a writer crafts the structure of the story, and Fu does a remarkable job. The past story of the girls' camping trip is strung out in small sections throughout the novel. I wanted to keep reading to find out just how the girls would escape, and if all the girls would survive. In between these sections are stories that could be read independently about each of the girl's current lives, with the treacherous camping trip as a background influence. Each of the girls backgrounds and stories are remarkably different, and each of the stories while complete in itself, comes to a final conclusion that is not plot-driven, but open-ended, beguiling, and reveals something about how the past experience permanently imprints on them in remarkable and subtle ways. If you like the emotional complexity and attention to detail in Jhumpa Lahiri's short stories, you'll like The Lost Girls too. 

Kyo Maclear's Birds Art Life restored my faith in the Canadian reading public. Not only did I find this unusual book at Costco, but according to the cover, it is a #1 National Bestseller. And so it should be. Maclear's memoir is the story of a year in her life when she found herself unmoored, unsettled with family responsibilities, in particular to her ailing father. She decides to take up birding, which results in small, yet perfect epiphanies about art and life. I read this book during a week in which I finished a first draft of my own memoir and found myself both disappointed with the results and unsure of how to fix it. I generally find the end of a writing project to be a letdown. I like the doing, not the having done. When I am still writing, I am full of hope and possibility. When a project is done, the possibility of rejection sets in. And so, I read Maclear's book about a time she was in between projects, with empathy. The time of not doing is often rich in hindsight, but to us type-A's with our checklists and restless forward motion, it can be unnerving.

In Birds Art Life, Maclear wanders Toronto looking for birds, wonders what it means to wait for a glimpse of wildlife, and takes stock of her life. She tells us about her childhood, her parents, about her life in Toronto, about the busyness of daily life, and then the daunting task (to me anyway) of abandoning her daily responsibilities to go look at birds. In the end Maclear lists things she learned from her birding mentor, The Musician. She says, "Good shoes go a long way," and other truisms like "Don't carry more than you need." More profoundly she says, "There are no big reasons to live. Just little reasons." I turned down the corner of the page when I read the following: "There is really no one person who can give you a map for living. But this may not stop us from wishing there were. It would be nice if there were such a person or such a book, with a list of things to do and avoid, definitive directions to take and not take, cautions to navigate by. Act this way. Live that way." 

This resonated with me deeply. I think I want someone to tell me what to do, if I'm making the right choices, but I don't actually want anyone to tell me these things. I resist all advice from the people closest to me to the point where they stopped making suggestions years ago. (My mother used to say if she said I should go left, then I would automatically go right.) Maclear's book reminds us that there is no one path forward, no easy answers on how to live, only small moments to treasure. 

This past Sunday my husband and I washed our deck and set out our patio furniture. The kids raked and helped set up the trampoline. It's been a slow spring, the leaves still not fully out on all our trees. As we ate dinner on the back porch we looked for birds. A woodpecker darted around our ash tree, and a cardinal flitted among the chestnut branches. We all watched with amusement as a blue jay took a bath in the puddle at the end of our sump pump pipe. We lingered, all tired and not ready for Monday. The birds provided a few minutes of respite before heading into the house to clean up after dinner and getting ready for the rest of the week.   

Rachel Cusk

My friend Nancy once mentioned that she figured out how many books she read in an average year and then figured out how many books she might be able to read in a lifetime. The figure was staggeringly low to both of us. How would I ever get to all the fantastic books on my reading list. Would I ever get to all the classics I wanted to read? 

Now with Goodreads my reading has become increasingly planned.

Whole swathes of my reading are dedicated to particular topics: 20th century Ukrainian history, 19th century British women in India, Canadian historical fiction. This doesn't leave room for a lot of spontaneity, except, as my children like to say, except sometimes. Sometimes your public library's collection of Ukrainian history is so thin, that you start to browse the shelves. I did this recently, looking at the history section of my local branch to see what else I could find. And, I stumbled upon a book by Rachel Cusk about traveling in Italy. I've never really thought too much about traveling in Italy, or the writer Rachel Cusk, but something about the paperback made me pick it up, and it was a welcome break from reading about the Ukraine. So far, nothing good every happens in Ukrainian history, and certainly not in Jewish Ukrainian history. Ever.

In Rachel Cusk's book "The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy," Cusk leaves England for Italy with her husband and two kids. Unlike most travel memoirs with their detailed itineraries and clear-set goals, Cusk's book has a dreamy aimlessness.  She and her family drive through France and stay in old chateau. They reach the south and swim in the sea before it is warm. They look at art and meet people in castles. Cusk's slightly laissez-faire ramblings, her charming writing style and her fine use of simile lure the reader into the heat of traveling in Italy, into the basilica of Francis Assis and the Umbrian hills without cliché. While Cusk travels to see Italian art, it is the description of the people she meets along the way that are really compelling. An older French bachelor who hosts the family for a night in an empty chateau, some small American girls who befriend her daughters, and an expatriate Scot who challenges Cusk and her husband to dueling tennis games in the Umbrian heat all lingered in my thoughts after I finished reading the book.

Cusk's memoir lead me to her fiction, and I recently gobbled up two of her novels, "Outline" and "Transit," which are part of a planned trilogy. Although I loved these books, I struggle with how to describe them. They are about a writer named Faye, who is divorced. In one book she is remodeling her flat. The people who rent below her are unspeakably horrible and spread terrible rumours about Faye because they do not like the construction noise. But this is not what the story is about. There isn't really any "about" in this novel. Instead the books tell a series of stories about Faye and the people she knows, about their lives and emotional struggles. Together these stories come together to form a new kind of novel, or what many critics have called, the reinvention of the novel. There's also a certain violence that rips through many of the scenes: a teenage boy's violent reaction to a haircut, an unwanted and somewhat disgusting kiss, but Cusk writes about these with such elegant tone that it turns the violence into something less threatening, something muted. It's on these muted notes that the story turns and caught my attention. The many small plots drive the story forward, but at the end of the book the reader is left with a different impression of both story and the shape of a novel. 

These novels not driven by plot allow the reader to focus on the beauty of the writing. Cusk writes rich, elegant and thought-provoking prove that I am happy to lose myself in. I've read a few other books like this recently, books that don't ask "what happens next," but take you on a journey through language.  I'm thinking of Jon McGregor's amazing "Reservoir 13," a book which sounded like it might be a whodunit, about a girl who disappears, but turns out to be more about the town around the disappeared girl, and how her disappearance affects and doesn't affect their lives. It's a book that explores loss and how it affects us over time, but it does it unlike any other author I've read before.