Everything My Mother Taught Me by Alice Hoffman

Published digitally by Amazon on December 19, 2019

Amazon commissioned five stories for a series it calls Inheritance. The stories are unconnected to each other except by the broad theme of family secrets. In a departure from its usual format, Tzer Island will review one story in the Inheritance series each day this week.

“Everything My Mother Taught Me” is told from a child’s point of view. Adeline Ivey is only twelve for most of the story, but in the tradition of fiction told from a child’s perspective, she is wise beyond her years. Perhaps her wisdom benefits from hindsight, although Adeline’s age at the time she tells the story is unclear. The narrative voice is distinctly Alice Hoffman’s and it does not match a twelve-year-old whose education has been minimal. It is therefore fair to assume that Adeline is telling the story at a later stage in her life. Still, Adeline portrays herself as having a deeper understanding of human nature than would be typical of a child raised in relative isolation.

The story is set in 1908, a time when women who felt unconstrained by the bounds of matrimony might have been termed promiscuous, or worse. Adeline tells us that her mother Nora “ruined my father’s life, and mine, and she didn’t seem to notice.” Nora did so by keeping company with men in the local tavern rather than her husband, who dies a quiet death while his wife is enjoying the attention of other men. None of Nora’s boyfriends want the burden of supporting a widow, so Nora is forced to take a job as a lighthouse keeper on a small rocky island near Boston.

For reasons of her own, Adeline stopped speaking after her father died. Her silence does not seem to trouble the island dwellers, some of whom she befriends. Eventually she gives advice and comfort to a married friend named Julie, who for some reason decides to confide in a mute twelve-year-old, perhaps because muteness assures that her secrets will not be revealed. In any event, the heart of the story concerns a conspiracy between Adeline and Julie, largely planned by Adeline, to save Julie from her abusive husband.

Alice Hoffman writes with quiet grace. The story ends in a satisfying way that instills warm feelings toward Adeline without relying on contrivances to manipulate the reader’s emotions — save perhaps for Adeline’s willful muteness, a character trait that is surprisingly unoriginal. In all other respects, however, I admire Hoffman’s restraint. “Everything My Mother Taught Me” does just enough to make its point — even a child can make and implement a life-altering decision, one that the child will intuitively know to be correct — without trying to do too much. I didn’t entirely buy Adeline’s silence or the setup, but I nevertheless enjoyed the story, and that’s what counts.

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The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman

Published by Simon & Schuster on September 24, 2019

This is only the second Alice Hoffman novel that I have read and I now realize that I am not her target audience. I am sure that audience will appreciate The World that We Knew more than I did. The novel is grounded in the superstition of religion, set in a world that humans share with unseen angels, where to speak the secret names of God causes lips to burn. Stories that depend on religious mythology might be more meaningful to readers who embrace religion than to readers who view mythology in fiction as a subset of fantasy. With few exceptions, I prefer the kind of fantasy that builds a separate world, one that stands apart from reality. The World that We Knew is an uncomfortable mix of the real and the supernatural. I suppose the book might be seen as magical realism, blending reality and fantasy to invite the reader to find beauty in the midst of ugliness, but if the beauty isn’t real, the invitation only emphasizes the ugly horror of reality.

In 1941, after killing a German soldier to save her daughter Lea from rape, Hanni Kohn decides to send Lea away from the growing threat to Berlin’s Jewish population. An elderly neighbor advises Hanni to visit a rabbi and ask him to make a golem to protect her daughter. The rabbi’s wife will not allow Hanni to speak to the rabbi, but the rabbi’s daughter knows the secret to golem creation and is willing to be bribed.

The golem is fashioned as a woman and given the name Ana. She is grateful to her maker for the chance to be in the world, but her devotion is to Lea. Tradition requires a golem to be destroyed before it becomes too powerful, but Ana loves being alive and at a later point in the story, contemplates running away. The prevailing belief is that Ana has no soul since she was not made by God. Killing a self-aware being who is otherwise indistinguishable from a human is not supposed to be morally troubling, at least to people who believe that the soul has an independent, God-made existence. I give credit to Hoffman for exploring that question (as science fiction writers have long done, and in greater depth), asking whether every living thing might have a soul. A character who considers dogs and doves simplistically concludes that “if you could love someone, you possessed a soul.” I would have been happy to see the philosophical golem behave selfishly by yielding to her instinct for self-preservation (selfishness, Hoffman tells us, is the first human trait a golem acquires), but like every other character in the novel, the golem’s actions are predictable.

Ana and Lea depart on a train, watching other Jewish women meet the Angel of Death as they try to escape from Germany. The story branches out at that point to follow both Lea, who is sheltered by various people in France in between hair-raising escapes, and the rabbi’s daughter Ettie, who abandons Orthodox teachings and adopts a new persona in a French village with the laudable but improbable goal of joining the Resistance and exacting revenge against the Nazis.

Lea and Ana crash the home of Lea’s distant cousin just as their maid, Marianne Félix, abandons the family in the belief that they do not “understand their slow disenfranchisement and the erosion of their rights.” Marianne returns to her family in the countryside near Lyon and eventually helps the Resistance. Hers is another branch of the story, joined with the story of a resistance fighter named Victor. A final branch is a love story involving Ana and Victor’s brother Julien, who find an unlikely way to tell each other to stay alive even after they are separated.

Holocaust stories are important, but they have often been told. Except for the addition of a golem and other elements of magic, and apart from Hoffman’s graceful prose, this one does little to distinguish itself from similar stories. In fact, the Holocaust is largely relegated to the background.  I understand that writers rely on the supernatural to illuminate the natural world (even when the world becomes as unnatural as it did during the Second World War), but I can’t say that I am a fan of that device here. The golem, the glowing angels that occasionally surround her, and the birds that do her bidding transform a story of gritty realism into a tale that might be found in a comic book.

The relationship between Lea and her mother-surrogate golem struck me as hokey, although other readers might find it touching. The two love stories, one tragic and the other not, are predictable. Ettie’s storyline is both predictable and too improbable to accept, even in a story that includes a golem who speaks birdsong. The novel’s final chapters rely on a string of coincidences to bring characters together. In the end, the novel isn’t even true to the mythology upon which it builds. Hoffman changes the nature of the golem to make a point about what it means to be human, but I don’t know that it makes sense to both accept and reject a myth.

The Angel of Death, the golem, the ability to foretell the future, chatting with birds, fortuitous coincidences, all in jarring contrast with the harsh reality of the Holocaust, didn’t juxtapose well for me. Layer that with trite pop song pronouncements about the power of love, and it was all just too much. Hoffman’s prose is beautiful, to be sure, and the story will certainly appeal to fans of romance fiction who have the ability to suspend their disbelief that a magical world could coexist with the greatest evil of the twentieth century, but I’m not that reader. I therefore recommend the novel only to fans of romance fiction and magic, and only then because of the strength of the prose.

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The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman

Published by Simon & Schuster on August 4, 2015

When writers choose to write fictional accounts of the lives of real people, the novel's success depends in part on whether they are writing about interesting people. I was more interested in the characters who appear in the second half of The Marriage of Opposites than those who appear in the first half, so I judged the novel as only a partial success. Although the most interesting character is the painter Camille Pissarro, we see very little of his artistic career in a novel that centers upon the lackluster life of Camille's mother.

In search of religious freedom, the Pomié family settled in St. Thomas in the late 1700s. Rachel Pomié begins her story in 1807. She grows up feeling oppressed by a mother who believes no purpose is served by her education. She longs for a civilized life in France, the country of her grandparents. Ten years later, as a dutiful daughter, she saves her family from financial ruin by consenting to an arranged marriage.

Rachel's childhood friend is Jestine, whose mother was a slave and who, like her mother, works as a maid. Jestine has a child, fathered by a lover who has been more-or-less adopted by Rachel's parents. The novel eventually turns into an extended family history that traces the lives of Rachel, Jestine and her illegitimate daughter, and Jacobo, one of Rachel's many children. Jacobo later adopts his middle name, Camille, while attending school in France.

Rachel has the qualities a modern author values in women -- emotional strength, intelligence, independence, courage -- making her seem a bit like the archetype of a modern woman who has been transplanted into early nineteenth century soil. Rachel's mother chastises Rachel for failing to accept that she is "a woman and nothing more," a fairly obvious device that Alice Hoffman uses to inspire sympathy for Rachel in her twenty-first century readers. Rachel is also kind, unprejudiced, passionate, level-headed, a loving mother to her children and step-children, a friend to servants, an opponent of slavery -- all admirable qualities that make her a little too perfect (at least until the end, when she begins to demonstrate some of her mother's inflexibility).

Rachel is headstrong and willing to defy convention in the name of love, which makes her a stereotypical romance novel heroine. She becomes something of an outcast, particularly among the gossipy members of her religious community. To the extent that The Marriage of Opposites is about the conflict between a community's judgment of a woman's moral values and a good woman's desire to follow her heart, it is an old story. Absent a fresh approach that is lacking here, the story just isn't very interesting. Adding a ghost (who is probably in Rachel's head) and a wise old herbalist simply accented Hoffman's use of literary devices that have been used many times before.

The first part of the novel, detailing Rachel's first and second marriages, cover familiar ground. Thanks to well-polished prose, events whiz along, but I was more taken by the descriptions of life in St. Thomas than by the various dramas with which Rachel must contend. At the novel's midway point, the story shifts to Jacobo, an artistic lad with the soul of a peacemaker. The novel later shifts to Paris, where Jestine's daughter lives and where Jacobo (now Camille) is trying to be an artist. All of this is easy to read but none of it grabbed me.

There is nevertheless much about the novel to admire, in addition to its faultless prose. The Marriage of Opposites illustrates how patterns learned early in life tend to shape us even when we despise those patterns. Rachel, for instance, cannot abide her mother's meddling in her life and resents all that she has been forbidden from doing, yet as she ages, she imposes her own prejudices upon Camille. Much of the story is about confronting the past, discovering roots, and coming to terms with heritage or family. To a lesser extent, it is about the destructive insularity of only befriending or doing business with members of the same race or religion. Those are worthy themes but they are not wrapped within a compelling story.

Love stories are scattered throughout the novel, providing occasional dramatic peaks, generally advancing the theme that love overcomes differences of class and race and (perhaps) religion, although characters tend to have more difficulty overcoming religious prejudices than others. Camille's struggle with romance might be the most interesting but it is relegated to only a few pages toward the novel's end. Other ordinary dramas of life -- births out of wedlock, snubs, spats, jealousies -- round out the story without contributing much in the way of energy. While the novel, like Rachel, sort of fizzles out in the end, there is enough to admire in this fairly dull story to earn it a guarded recommendation.

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