At the heart of The Joyful Child, the new novel by Norman Ravvin (Gaspereau Press), is a subtle, charming sketch of a father-son relationship.
The joyful child of the title is four-year-old Nick, innocent, playful, wide-eyed and curious. His father is Paul, whose life seems to be drifting away from its moorings even as his marriage to his wife, Mary, falls apart. In the centre of the book, Paul takes Nick on the road for a series of what the child happily describes as “adventures.”
Emblems of impermanence, such as signposts or rusted-out old automobiles along an old highway, are strewn throughout the story. There are dreamlike quests, ruminations about loss, disappearing vagabond cousins that Paul must find, and various other forms of uprootedness.
“All he [Paul] wanted for his son was solidity. Stability. If he could shield him from his own rootlessness, his wanderings and self-doubt and regret, he’d be happy. The boy, lovely and naive, was still untouched by it all. His own life, Paul knew, had a tumbleweedy quality to it.”
The early chapters sketching out the family’s domestic life are essentially descriptive without any rising dramatic action; not a good recipe for readability. But when Paul and Mary entrust a young woman living in a hippie-style caravan near their home to babysit Nick, and she is late in returning the boy, a vague, looming menace is introduced. The reader is made to consider the horrible possibility, never explicity expressed, that the caravan will be gone and the boy abducted.
But no, this is neither a novel about child abduction nor a marriage gone awry: Mary just seems to disappear without foreshadow or explanation. However, the sense of vague menace continues. Ravvin utilizes a somewhat distant, infrequently visible narrator (a transient friend) leaving open the possibility that something horrible will happen to Paul. (It does.) Perhaps the real fear, too awful to be considered directly, is that something horrible and final will happen to the joyful child – that he will lose his innocence and purity, as he must. So, as in a dream, that possibility must be transmuted into something else.
Despite a minimum of plot and story points, The Joyful Child is a subtle, sensitive piece about the ephemeral nature of life and childhood innocence. It is Ravvin’s third novel. He is also the author of a much sharper and pointed collection of short stories, Sex, Skyscrapers and Standard Yiddish, as well as the non-fiction Hidden Canada: An Intimate Travelogue.
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Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire by Jeffrey Veidlinger (Indiana University Press)
In this non-fiction academic work published in 2010, Veidlinger, an academic at Indiana University, offers a new perspective on the vibrant Yiddish culture that flourished across the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The period featured many prominent Jewish writers, historians and other cultural figures, including Sholom Aleichem, Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholem Asch, Y. L. Peretz and Simon Dubnow. It also saw the emergence of many new cultural organizations such as libraries, drama circles, literary clubs, historical societies and even fire brigades.
Veidlinger observes that this “flowering of a grassroots secular culture” in the last years of the Russian Empire allowed Jews to step outside their tradition religious paradigm and to live for today, not just for the “next world,” and also to permit a mode of expression within the wider multicultural society.
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A Man in Uniform by Kate Taylor (Doubleday Canada)
Toronto author Kate Taylor studied France’s infamous Dreyfus affair at university and found in it “a detective story worthy of le Carré.” After featuring elements of the story obliquely in her first novel, Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen, she decided that it could “form the spine of a second novel.” Thus, A Man in Uniform was born.
Lawyer Francois Dubon lives in a bourgeois eighth arrondissement of Paris when a mysterious widow visits his office, beseeching his help in rescuing her innocent friend, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who has been wrongfully accused of treason. What follows is a noirish detective novel set in late-19th-century Paris.
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The Day My Mother Cried by William D. Kaufman (Syracuse University Press)
The roughly 30 unadorned first-person tales in this short-story collection seem almost indistinguishable from memoir. Some are set in the author’s parents’ world in Ukraine, some in his American childhood, some on his international travels.
Kaufman is an inventive craftsman of autobiographical episodes with a distinctly literary bent. For the mature Jewish writer attempting to pen his or her memoirs, The Day My Mother Cried is especially recommended as a model of what is possible, using only stuff within easy reach: personal tales that are then minimally burnished or embellished into art.
