ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Pressing on with #WITMonth, I’ve read the second book I have by Rachel Shihor: Yankinton.
The title is a kind of sad joke: Mr Yankinton wanted to change his Russian name to fit in:

Mr Yankinton Hebraicized his name, as many residents of the land of Israel did in those days, after he heard his daughter singing the Song of the Hyacinth (in Hebrew yakinton) as she had learnt it in nursery school.  The song begins with the words ‘Nighttime, nighttime , the moon is watching,’ and the father liked it immediately, finding in it a particular innocence which in his eyes was bound up with love for this land and love for his daughter, two loves entwined in his soul.

But in those days proper Hebrew was not in demand as much as it could have been, such that he accepted his baby daughter’s pronunciation without checking it, and the flower which the moon watched remained yankinton in his ears and not yakinton as it is written in the dictionaries, and thus he recorded it at the Interior Ministry…(p.8)

In a blurb for another book, a reviewer by name of Mona Reiserer is quoted from the Quarterly Conversation that Shihor’s writing penetrates to the truth of the aches and anxieties all people share, though they must generally suffer them alone. In this book, it is the observations of the young child negotiating the intricacies of the new state of Israel, written from the perspective of an older adult many years later.

Amid her memories of being hopelessly outclassed in a dress-up competition; of her delight in books as a respite from the anxieties of family life; and of the escape and demise of a favourite monkey from the zoo, the novella is also a rendition of an Israel different to the assertive, successful state it is today, ranked 27th among the world’s wealthy economies.  There are poor districts, and there are families poorer than they are, including a cousin who joins the family in the hope that coaching will improve his academic prospects.  Father, whose hopes of an academic life were foiled by his exile from Russia, turns out to be a fine, if idiosyncratic teacher, and the boy becomes a geographer — not finding sunken pirate ships as he’d hoped but the editor of a marine research encyclopaedia.

For the narrator’s family, there is a miraculous year when the columns of profits began to replace the columns of losses in his business ledger.  Her father’s steps to improve the family’s quality of life consist of buying a book of psalms on parchment instead of paper, and an announcement that brought joy to this little booklover’s life:

On Fridays we would begin to receive one book of our choice. My father kept this agreement for one year before he had to cease because the balance of profits in his business became poor again and even began to deterioriate. But that year, we would come home from school on Fridays one and a half hours late, to my mother’s relief, since she could be one and a half hour’s late to finish preparing lunch.  (p.114)

In a state populated by refugees from the Holocaust and antisemitism trying to build new lives, Mother’s erratic behaviour is clearly trauma-related.

A baby brother born when this troubled woman is 39 provokes a droll summary of the reproductive process as relayed by a little friend called Yael but our narrator knows that this is clearly wrong:

I, who had once asked my parents how a baby was born, knew that a baby was born from the wedding when the rabbis stands with the bride and groom under the marriage canopy and blesses them. (p.140)

But the arrival of this baby finds the narrator sent away to a farm while her mother recuperates, only to be brought home in haste when her mother, in a fit of distraction was hit by a car when crossing a road.  All the child’s fears about losing a parent are resurrected, reminding me that for children of Holocaust survivors, this fear was pervasive.

Shihor’s style is discursive, in long paragraphs lasting two pages or more, and the structure is episodic rather than conforming to any narrative arc, but the mosaic of characters is finely drawn and the city of Tel Aviv is brought vividly to life.  I enjoyed this one more than Days of Peace…

BTW It is my usual practice to indicate the year of first publication in the original language when it’s a translation, but this is not indicated in this Seagull edition, and I can’t find it online.  2020 is the year of the first English translation.

Author: Rachel Shihor
Title: Yankinton
Translated by Sara Tropper and Esther Frumkin
Cover design by Sunandini Banerjee
Publisher: Seagull Books, 2020
ISBN: 9780857427960, hbk., 153 pages followed by four and a half pages of translators notes which clarify aspects of the text
Source: Personal library, purchased direct from Gazebo Books Australia in partnership with Seagull Books,$29.99

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comments on all books set in Palestine or Israel,
and books written by Palestinian, Israeli, and Jewish authors are closed for the duration.
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