Of Folklore and Family
It is hard to fully be ourselves with someone else, a compelling debut novel, City of Laughter (Grove Atlantic, $27.00) by Temim Fruchter insists. It is also profoundly worth it, if we can figure out how.
Fruchter’s protagonist, 32-year-old Shiva Margolin, deals with the death of her father and her general sense of being stuck by embarking on a Master’s degree in Jewish studies (as one does!) Shiva’s focus is on folklore, which takes her to Poland and deep into her own family’s past. I had a friend once say that all dissertations are therapy: Fruchter seems to agree, though we don’t know if Shiva (born as her grandmother died, and named after the Jewish week of mourning) will reach enough self-awareness to understand why she’s on this journey.
City of Laughter travels in “the passage between two worlds” exploring Jewish folklore across generations; queer kinship; Shiva’s search for identity; and generations of one family.
Shiva’s story carries with it the idea that “desire does not deplete with generations, and that in most cases, it only gathers a kind of steam.” Each of the characters is defined by yearning, sometimes toward one another. Jewish readers may feel they know these women: the charming and millennial Shiva; her suburban Jewish mother Hannah; her elusive grandmother Syl; and her mysterious great-grandmother Mira. But the connection they seek, we know, is fraught within families, within traditions, within queer kinship that doesn’t know itself as such, within the Judaism that Fruchter lovingly dissects with casual discussions of the shabbat table, the eruv, the mikveh. Sometimes love means, in this world Fruchter knows best, spitting at babies to protect them from the evil eye.
For Shiva, there is also a ghostly other: a digital friend (or more than that), who ghosts her before they were meant to meet on Shiva’s research trip to Poland to delve into the history of a playwright, S. An-sky. It was, Shiva reflects, “her desire to name her own restlessness and stuckness” that led her to “better understand this man and his dogged devotion to preserving Jewish families’ stories. “In other words, she fell in love.”
So Shiva turns to academic research to reach back to her foremothers, to study folklore to better understand their own haunts and hauntings. Her journey takes her to the Pale of Settlement, to Poland, to Warsaw, and to her own ancestral shtetl, site of so many Jewish hauntings and history. This place is also, in Fruchter’s imagination, a place for a possible queer Jewish future.
Shiva never knew her grandmother in life, and she also never knew her in the kinds of family stories we hand down to keep our ancestors alive. Her mother Hannah never talked about Syl, deliberately refusing to answer questions, and thus, deliberately not letting Shiva participate in her past. It is only with Shiva’s father Jon’s death that Shiva’s mother begins to understand the cost of this denial both to her relationship with Shiva and to her relationship to her own mother and past. Hannah begins to understand that past, including maybe – just maybe – her own sexuality, inherited from her mother and passed down to her daughter, “a kind of genetics of wanting” from her “line of women made for not strictures but permission.”
Spanning four generations of Jewish women, Fruchter’s playful and but complicated novel is both a beautiful story and a promise that’s just out of reach. Fruchter invites us to risk looking into mirrors literal and metaphoric to see not just ourselves but what is behind us, and what might be ahead. “Mirrors were destined for greatness, and if pushed, they’ll remind you” to see things differently, Fruchter writes. The novel leaves both the future and the past open, offering gorgeous scenes of loving friendship and queer kinship, impossible alliances between people who don’t exist at the same time or place.
Sharrona Pearl is an Associate Professor at Drexel University. Her latest book is Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other.
