By Nancy Richler, HarperCollins, 2001
Nancy Richler's Your Mouth is Lovely is a beautiful, enthralling
novel set
in Russia between the years 1887-1912. The time line encompasses the
revolutionary fervour enveloping Tsar Nicholas II's Russia, including
the
horrific Bloody Sunday massacre and failed revolution of 1905. A time
of
demonstrations, terror, and assassinations. And, of course, a time of
pogroms and random acts of violence against the Jews of Russia. Yet,
despite the sweeping backdrop of history, Richler's novel is a study in
miniatures- an incisive portrait of character and place as narrated by
Lovely's heroine Miriam while languishing in a Siberian prison camp.
Into this world of violence and misery, Miriam is born in an insignificant
shtetl. Polyseh, built in the Polyseh Swamp and on the edge of the Pripet
river, is small, muddy, and claustrophobic. Like the rampant reeds and
grasses of the swamp, village life is a quicksand of sentiment, love,
and
superstitious ignorance. Bubbe meises- old wives' tales-compete with Talmud
and Torah to explain the mystery and chaos of life. How else to understand
the inexplicable, like the death of Miriam's older brother, gasping fruitlessly
for air at his birth? Naturally, it was his mother's fault.
First, for thinking that her unborn son was "destined
for greatness," and
second, for telling the other women in the town- "That was reckless,
foolhardy. The evil eye couldn't help but be tempted." And after
Miriam's
mother walks into the river the day after her birth, Lipsa the wet nurse
performs an intricate ritual to tempt Miriam's bad luck away, even changing
her name from Nechama (comfort) to Miriam (Bitter Sea). Richler vividly
captures the relentless power of these bubbe meises to both engender the
fear of reprisal and the security of order.
Alternating with this evocation of shtetl life are brief
moments from
Miriam's present in Siberia's Maltzev Prison. She is writing her life
story
for the daughter that was torn from her at birth by prison authorities.
Miriam is among the political prisoners, although she believes her act
was
criminal, but "well-dressed in beautiful words: the higher good,
the
loosening of humanity's shackles." In these brief vignettes, Richler
captures the essence of Maltzev-the cramped quarters (although better
than the "filth and squalor of the criminals' section") and
the sterile cold:
"It is not a living cold that shifts and changes but a bitter stillness,
a
stagnancy that presses upon us hour after hour, day after day, month after
month." Richler's eye is clear, whether finding moments of terror
and
beauty in the prison or rendering a very human but unsentimental picture
of
shtetl life.
Richler's characters are also as finely drawn. This is a
novel mainly
populated by women; women of the village, mothers, daughters, factory
workers, Bundists, agitators, assassins, terrorists, and prisoners. They
grow and evolve touched and changed both by ordinary daily life and the
larger historical events of the times. Two pivotal characters are the
novel's heroine Miriam and her stepmother Tsila.
Miriam is driven and shaped by the core of loneliness at
her soul. Her
mother's shameful suicide and her own "unnatural" survival -
"I shouldn't
have lived, of course. A more respectful child would have died" -
marked
her from birth as an outcast. Miriam reflects, "I craved warmth,
sought it
from every gaze that came my way, warmth and reassurance that were rarely
forthcoming." Not until age fourteen does Miriam make her first friend,
Sara, a budding Bundist. She become's Miriam's gateway into the secret
world of the socialist revolutionary. But Miriam's political involvement
is not rooted in deep socialist conviction. Rather, it is almost accidental,
the product of friendship, grief, and circumstances. And it ultimately
leads her to tragic consequences.
Miriam is six when Tsila becomes her stepmother, bringing
her home from
Lipsa's loving but ignorant and superstitious care. Tsila too is an
outcast, of her own making. Intelligent and independent, her scorn for
the
village women and their gossipy, superstitious pronouncements is obvious
to all. In retaliation, the villagers call her "sour as spoiled milk,"
and
ascribe her facial birthmark to "the unmistakable red handprint of
the
angel that had slapped her before birth." Despite this, Tsila's artistry
as
a seamstress is much sought after. And although she is unable to impart
this gift to Miriam's clumsy fingers, she gives her something infinitely
more: the power of the word.
Richler celebrates the word in the novel's title, Your Mouth
is Lovely, a
phrase from the Song of Songs, offered as a prayer when a child speaks
its first words. And Tsila echoes it when she teaches Miriam the aleph-beis.
Pointing to the letters she tells Miriam, "this is your mother now
. .
knowledge will be your mother." The written word is a mother's womb,
birthing and disseminating ideas and knowledge. It might be the Torah
Miriam studies with Tsila, fragments of a Bialik poem, Sara's preference
for Darwin and Karl Marx, or pamphlets denouncing the Tsar. Just as we
are at the mercy of chance (or fate), so too can the power of language
shape and change the course of a person's life. The novel itself is a
testament to faith in the power of the word. Lovely is Miriam's gift of
knowledge to her daughter, "my meager offering, my attempt to clear
a path to your own beginning."
Richler's prose is powerful. Her style is somehow spare
and yet lush at the
same time. Spare in that not a single word is unnecessary or wasted. Each
word is carefully chosen, polished and precise. And lush in its descriptive
imagery and strength. You can taste and smell the fruit that Miriam's
father longs for, "the soft curve of a peach in his hand, the fragrance
of
apricots, the hard, shining flesh of ripe cherries." Your Mouth is
Lovely
is an unusual book of rare beauty and insight that will linger in the
imagination long after the last page is turned. Make sure that you have
several hours free when you begin; you won't want to put it down.