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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

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.