THE FRONT OF THE FAMILY
THE FRONT OF THE FAMILY
By Renata Singer. Abbotsford, Australia: Bruce Sims, 2001
The Front of the Family is a novel set in Australia's Jewish
milieu,
among the generation of children of Holocaust survivors now in their
fifties. The novel begins with an ending, at a funeral, which is
described twice, from the points of view of the two sisters whose
mother has just died. The book proceeds in alternating chapters as
the two women pursue their family's history and investigate the
boundaries of truth, lies, and loyalty.
The question posed by the death of this single Holocaust
survivor is
how our lives alter when personal knowledge of events passes out of
living memory; and how choices we make about our futures are affected
by our understanding of the past. The women in this book think about
religion, marriage, independence, sex, children, and work through the
prism of their parents' Holocaust experiences. They begin to
understand that part of their family story may be a lie, but take
separate paths in putting that understanding to work for themselves.
Miriam is driven to discover the "truth," perhaps looking for
an
escape into the past, since the present is marked by a crisis in her
marriage.Her sister Felunia is inclined to believe in the partial or
emotional "truths" their parents did share with them-uneasy
with
confronting secrets lest her own relationship's shortcomings need
examination. The same basic problem is individual for the person
going through it, Singer seems to be telling us.
Yet for their differences, some things unite them: Neither
finds
mourning made any easier by the fact that their mother was a highly
ambiguous figure in their lives. Their mother's death, it seems,
really is a beginning, at least for one of the sisters, Miriam, whose
internal monologue as the funeral is winding down goes like this:
Well this is it God. I've had it. I am too tired. My mother's gone so
there's no more need to pretend everything is fine with me, no need
to keep up appearances for her sake. So that people don't talk, so
the community will think what a nice family that Zosha Feldman has,
what a lucky woman, such clever lovely daughters. I can crack up now.
Most of the other characters in the story are Holocaust survivors and
their families, almost all of whom are similarly vexed by the gloss
put on the less savory portions of the past. Here is one family
friend whom the sisters have approached with questions about their
parents:
"Adash I know since I was a girl. Of course he was a very good man,
a
very good father. Zosha was my best friend. I miss her very much,
your mother. When I watch the news I think what she would say about
this and that. How she would like me to talk to you girls. We all
getting older and not so strong, of course. She was a good wife to
Adash and a wonderful mother to you. It wasn't so easy for her when
you come back from Israel with a baby. Maybe you like a cup of
coffee. I've got of course some good biscuits."
You couldn't get an answer with much less content. This
is not just
an act of omission, but an active obscuring of anything not in the
public record. What does it mean that Holocaust survivors understand
better than anyone the cultural necessity to tell your story, to bear
witness to your own life-yet lie to and keep secrets from their
children on the most important family matters? In some way this is
parallelled by the emotional lives of the two sisters, whose most
intimate thoughts and feelings are laid out for the reader, while
outwardly they put on any number of disguises, even with those they
love.
It is the sister who at first will not look at the past
who ends up
most changed by it. Felunia finally has to make decisions about her
own marriage, bringing her all the turmoil she had hoped to avoid,
while Miriam's headlong rush into the past seems to heal her present.
In both cases, human communication remains as much of a mystery as
always. Singer's novel raises all the right questions to make easy
answers both impossible and undesirable. It is also a wonderful
aspect of this story that the main characters are middle-aged women,
fully realized people, who are able to take care of themselves at
times while at other times they are stymied by their situations, who
are able to speak some times but lapse into paralysed silence at
other times and who are more to themselves, inside, than they can
ever show on the outside. Simply put, this is a beautiful book.