GERSHOW

Regional writers Dawid, Gershow offer up new volumes

By KATIE SCHNEIDER

article created on: 2009-03-15T00:00:00

“And Darkness Was Under His Feet: Stories of a Family” by Annie Dawid, Litchfield Review Press, February 2009, Paperback, $

Annie Dawid left Portland a few years ago. After teaching and directing the creative writing program at Lewis and Clark College for 15 years, she moved to the mountains of south-central Colorado to write full-time.

Her most recent book, “And Darkness Was Under His Feet: Stories of a Family” was published last year by the Litchfield Review Press. It is based on stories told to her by her paternal relatives in the United States and abroad.

“And Darkness” starts in Raduatz, Bukovina, an area that is today split between Ukraine and Romania. In “Shabbat, 1900,” Lazar and Reizl Solomon sit at the table with their three sons.

Abraham and Isaac are already men, already plotting their escape from their father’s tyranny. David, the youngest, is just a baby. He will grow up without his brothers. They will be disowned by their stern father and mourned by their gentle mother when they move away.

Lazar and Reizl’s sons find jobs and marry, but they don’t find security in 20th-century Europe. They adopt new customs, learn new languages, even serve in the army, only to find that they remain a people apart.

Only David, living in Dresden, has remained religious. It is his immediate family that bears the brunt of the Holocaust. Sons and daughters of Abraham and Isaac escape, either through cleverness or sheer luck, ending up in France, China and England.

In the post-war era, the unlucky ones are trapped behind the Iron Curtain, arbitrarily separated from loved ones and freedom. Some families remain close. Others, divided by geography and temperament, fall out of touch.

Two generations later, at the dawn of the 21st century, the Solomon descendents are scattered all over the globe. The final (and longest) story depicts their coming together in a chaotic family reunion. The participants are hard to keep track of, the cousins chattering and arguing, trying to keep track of their relation to each other. For Lazar and Reizl’s descendants, time has marched on. The family’s youngest are now the elderly generation, an object of interest to the historian in the group.

“And Darkness,” subtitled ‘Stories of a Family,’ reads much more like a novel. There is little comparison to Dawid’s previous collection “Lily in the Desert,” which offered up a cornucopia of situations and characters, all quite distinct. The stories in “And Darkness” are slight but numerous, a scene here, a glimpse of a personality there, with years and sometimes continents in between. The effect is like that of an old family album, where black-and-white photographs are pasted carefully in place, a woman’s spidery handwriting underneath.

Dawid glosses over the great sweep of history to good effect, preferring the intimate scene to the grand fanfare out on the street.

She is well aware that her readers are sophisticated enough to make the temporal and geographic leaps she requires. She is ambitious too, attempting to sum up the whole of family life in less than two hundred pages.

Perhaps it is no surprise that the cousins and their relationship become fuzzy toward the end. Not only are there too many of them, but their lives haven’t been fully lived.

Few of us (including Dawid perhaps) look at contemporary photographs with the same kind of intense curiosity reserved for those albums of archival black-and-whites. “The Local News” by Miriam Gershow, Spiegal and Grau, February 2009, hardcover, $24.95

Danny was an athlete. He was popular. Unbeknownst to adults, he smoked pot and bullied other kids. Nothing out of the ordinary, really, except that one night he just didn’t come home. “Going missing,” high-school sophomore Lydia Pasternak wants to yell, “was the only interesting thing my brother had ever done.”

“The Local News,” a debut novel by Eugene writer Miriam Gershow, is about tragedy and the way it can forever sever a person from normal life.

After her brother disappears, Lydia’s parents withdraw, leaving her to struggle with the strange and confusing ramifications of his absence.

She sticks posters in shop windows, watches her own interviews on TV and walks past her brother’s locker at school, decorated with flowers to mourn his absence.

Lydia helps a private detective search for Danny, but her efforts come to naught.

Pitch-perfect in its depictions of high school alienation and grief, “The Local News” delves deeply into the thoughts and feelings of a sensitive young woman.

Gershow teaches at the University of Oregon and Portland State University. She will read from “The Local News” at Powell’s on Hawthorne, Feb. 26 at 7:30 p.m.This story made possible by a grant from the Judith and Edwin Cohen Foundation.