Good Reads for the Road

The Tale-Teller
author Susan Glickman
publisher Cormorant Books

by Alessandra Ferreri

In 1768, a young woman arrives at the port of New France disguised as a man.

The success of her journey undiscovered is short lived as she is quickly picked out for questioning by Quebec officials. Rather than speak plainly, the woman named Esther Brandeau, delves into a fantastic story about her unusual upbringing on a remote island by a family of apes.

Skeptical of her story, the officials put Esther under house arrest until they can decide what to do with her. No one suspects that Esther is  Jewish, and thus prohibited from entering New France. With her fate left to the officials, Esther keeps her true self shrouded in mystery.

Instead, the power of her tale-telling charms the minds and hearts  of everyone she encounters and Esther becomes a societal sensation with stories of exotic beaches, pirate raids, kidnapped children, desert nomads and lost love, all with gorgeous detail and delicate insight far beyond her years and social position.

Based on a real figure, The Tale-Teller is a detailed look at Canadian society in 1768 and a commentary on the strength and versatility of a young woman who chose to combat the social limitations of her gender and religion with shrewdness and imagination.

Not only does author Susan Glickman illuminate the beauty of New France in the 18th century, but she takes us all over the world through the delightful musing of a female hero you cannot help but love. My only complaint would be that I wanted it to last longer. At just over 200 pages, The Tale-Teller is a rather quick read, which leaves some details skimmed over in favour of others and I’m a greedy reader when it comes to historical fiction.  Published by Cormorant Books (a fabulous Canadian publisher) in 2012, The Tale-Teller is a rich, poetic read for the historical-fiction lover.

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Today’s Music

Susan Glickman’s book, The Smooth Yarrow, shows a chilling awareness of mortality through the accumulation of injuries like broken bones and the loss of teeth. Not old yet, she is close enough to celebrate elderly women “who use their best china every day / and jump the queue at the grocery store because they have so little in their baskets / and no time to waste.” Even her garden poems mix exquisite celebrations of new life with knowledge of the transience of beauty. The first section of her work is called “Homeopathic Principles.” Whatever the truth of homeopathy as a medical practice might be, the philosophy of treating an illness with drugs that induce its symptoms is – suggestive. A poem can build up our resistance by administering mild doses of the very toxins that we suffer from in living: sickness, age, grief. The loss of a loved one is the greatest toxin of all, and Glickman’s elegy  for her father, “Breath,” offers not consolation but a powerful recreation of his passing, with the breath of the dying man as the focal point for a family unsure how to react. Emily Dickinson’s great poem, “IheardaFlybuzz–whenI died” comes to mind, but the confusion in Glickman’s poem is in the watchers, not the person dying. “We hesitated, no longer sure what to pray for.” Uncertainty is the paradoxical remedy here, evidence of how deeply the family cares. The poem that deals explicitly with homeopathy as a metaphor is “Homeopathic Remedies for Scar Tissue.” Glickman knows that life is a series of scarring experiences. One remedy is to smear sandalwood paste on the injury. It will attract bees, from which we may learn how to dance in the sun and how to fight back, though a bee’s self-defence is fatal. But life is fatal, after all. In one of her excellent garden poems she celebrates the compacted hearts of rosehips (analogues for the mature poet), and calls them “Late bloomers: late / as in late Brahms. Not tardy / but ripe.” The analogy with the great autumnal works of Brahms is a good one and also fits Glickman’s own wise and elegant work.

“In her fictional work The Tale-Teller (Cormorant Books), Glickman highlights Esther’s crafty ability to tell fascinating and beguiling stories about herself and her adventures that keep her listeners spellbound. Many of the details she gleans from books (such as Robinson Crusoe) in the library of her host, Intendant Hocquart, in whose home she becomes a temporary servant while her case is being decided. During that interval she acts as a Jewish Scheherazade, spinning charming, almost spellbinding tales in order to win a reprieve from deportation.

Wishing to become an indispensible member of the household, Esther tries to seduce her hosts with her culinary skills. Having brought a bag of cocoa beans with her from New France, she cooks them, pounds them into a mortar, adds almonds, hazelnut, sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg and an egg, and pours the whipped concoction into a cup for Monsieur Hocquart.

“He was delighted, proclaiming that Esther’s chocolate was the finest he had ever tasted; better than the beverage served in the finest homes in France; better than that Beauharnois drank every morning for breakfast to give him stamina for his amorous and military conquests. Hocquart had often drunk chocolate at other people’s houses but no one in his staff knew how to prepare it properly. Esther having revealed this talent, he would be happy to drink chocolate morning, noon and night.”

The Tale-Teller is likewise an appealing confection, a colourful historical adventure-fantasy and a skilful imagining of the inhabitants of New France in its early period before 1759.”

– Bill Gladstone, CJNews, February 21, 2013

The Smooth Yarrow by Susan Glickman

The Smooth Yarrow, Signal Editions, 64 pages, $18

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By Barbara Carey Poetry Columnist

“The universe is a cabinet of mysteries we tiptoe by, wondering,” Susan Glickman writes in one of the poems in The Smooth Yarrow. That capacity for wonder is a hallmark of this Toronto writer’s appealing sixth collection.

The title refers to an herb traditionally believed to have both medicinal and magical properties. In keeping with that motif, many of the poems in the book’s first section address frailty, both physical and emotional, and our attempts to heal ourselves — as well as the intangibles that affect our lives. Glickman also contemplates failings of the social order: in “Witch’s Tit,” for instance, she muses on humankind’s tendency throughout history to persecute others on the basis of appearance.

Glickman notes that the yarrow looks fragile but is actually resilient. The poet’s own work is somewhat deceptive: she writes with clarity and unassuming grace about a range of subjects, including the death of her father (in the book’s most poignant poem, “Breath”). She’s also capable of broad humour (the iconic poet Rilke is depicted lazing in a hammock and sipping a Long Island Iced Tea: who says waiting for inspiration to strike is hard work?). Though seemingly direct, her poems frequently operate on more than one level. The book’s final section is a gardener’s journal of observations about plants, insects and weather. But the garden also serves as a metaphor for life itself (as it has for many poets through the ages), with its cycle of growth and decay, and the utter unpredictability of what will thrive and what won’t.

Elsewhere, she describes the quality of light that makes “the half-full glass of autumn brim over//with glory. Not an upper case, grandiose kind of Glory/but a halo tossed like a Frisbee, accidental and luminous.” Glickman’s own poetry is rooted in the quotidian, not the grandiose. But it’s quietly affecting and often luminous.

Aaron Hart has long been recognized as pre-Confederation Canada’s first Jewish immigrant. A commisary officer with the British troops at the time of Jeffrey Amherst’s 1760 capture of Montreal, Hart settles in Trois- Rivières, where he played a prominent role developing the town into a leading trade centre. To avoid intermarriage he returned to England and married his cousin, Dorthea Rivieres. By the time Hart died in 1800 he was reputed to be the wealthiest man in the British colonies.

Susan Glickman’s novel begins 22 years before Hart took up permanent residence in Trois-Rivières. Then belonging to New France, Quebec was a province where non-Catholic immigrants — or those who refused to convert — were forbidden entry. A young woman, disguised as a boy named Jacques Lafargue, arrives on a ship from France. An interrogation reveals she is Esther, the daughter of David Brandeau, a merchant Jew. Five years previous, Esther was sent by her parents to Amsterdam, but the boat on which she sailed was lost on the sandbanks of Bayonne. The rest is history, and also where Glickman’s whimsical plot takes flight, driven by Esther’s insatiable quest for freedom and adventure.

Glickman portrays a female hero who loathes having to conceal her Jewish faith. Both Esther and her father are descended from anusim, Jews who were forced to abandon their observance of Jewish rituals. After the Spanish Inquisition, some of these anusim fled Spain for France and subsequently succeeded in establishing themselves as merchants essential to the colonial shipping industry. Success came at a price — a life filled with restrictions, including higher taxes for similar incomes earned by French compatriots.

Esther, a lonely teenaged girl, morphs into a version of the legendary Scheherezade; she tells stories to avoid deportation. The reader is riveted by the depth of knowledge acquired during her early education in Bayonne and supplemented by her voracious reading in the libraries of people among whom she lives as a hidden Jewess. While telling her fantastical tales, she closes her eyes, seducing her listeners with the flow of her poetic language, and often an accompanying drink of chocolate whose ingredients are always miraculously within her grasp. All this changes when after one year in New France, she is forced to tell her real story. We learn the Ladino proverb La ija del Djudio, no keda sin kazar, which translates as “no daughter of a Jew remains unmarried.” Esther explains this means that all hidden Jewish daughters of anusim have a duty to go forth and multiply, which is the reason she was sent to Amsterdam at age 15 to an arranged marriage that she desperately did not desire.

Reminscent of the apochryphal Esther, who disguised herself as a non-Jew to marry King Ahasueras of Persia, fictional Esther Brandeau says, “I did not run away from my faith. I ran away from the limitations that faith subjected me to.” The numerous stories, imaginatively invented to fit each situation in which she finds herself, bring to mind the Talmudic tradition of midrash, tapping into legends and weaving nobler alternatives. In Esther’s quest, she discovers that although she may be the first young woman who came to New France disguised as a boy, she is certainly not the first of New France’s anusim.

Glickman is also an established poet, and earlier this year she released her sixth book of poetry, The Smooth Yarrow. Like Margaret Atwood, Glickman’s intelligence and superior narrative abilities have enabled her to transition skilfully from one genre to the other, and she is at the top of her game in both.

• Sharon Abron Drache’s third collection of short fiction, Barbara Klein Muskrat Then and Now, was just released by Inanna Publications.

On Writing, with Susan Glickman | Open Book: Toronto.

The Midwest Book Review

June 2012

“Bernadette to the Rescue” is the fourth adventure book of a popular series about a third grade eccentric, lovable girl detective with eco-learnings. Bernadette and her friends Annie, Keisha, and Megan decide to attend day camp together after finishing third grade, and although Bernadette fears she will miss her usual museum camp experiences, she finds challenge and meaning in investigating a mysterious disappearance of a local frog population. Using scientific method, Bernadette arrives at some surprising findings and enjoys good fellowship and growth in meeting new challenges along the way. “Bernadette to the Rescue” is a chapter book for readers ages 7-9, with appealing characters, quirky black and white drawings by Melanie Allard, and fast action with built in surprises. To instill a healthy send of self and empowerment especially in young girls along with improving language and reading skills, there is nothing like this charming series. The characters radiate genuine concern for each other and the environment, and the political correctness factor is not annoyingly obsessive, just underlying.