Turn The Book Around and Upside Down
“Here in two beginnings with nary an end”—so begins the latest Leah Hagar Cohen plucky structure-bending novel of girlhood discovery and adventure. To and Fro (Bellevue Literary Press $18.99) is a book unlike any I’ve read recently. Annamae Galinsky narrates Fro as a child in modern New York City, living with her older brother and a frazzled single mother who’s a professor of linguistics.
Or rather, if you turn the book over, Ani begins the novel at To, where she lives in a mysterious house, the Captain’s house, where she found refuge after being expelled from her father’s house, along with her mother who has died along the way. He is called Captain but his real name is Malachi, the Hebrew word for messenger, and he is a kind of caregiver to lost souls who find themselves shipwrecked in his house. People come and go and the Captain feeds them, takes care of their ailments; most of them have something or another wrong with them. When he leaves abruptly to travel to Away-From-Here. Ani grabs a tiny, unweaned kitten she calls “Company” and takes off to follow the Captain. Along the way, in a kind of dreamscape of uncertain place and time—bicycles exist but cars do not—Ani meets several groups, possible communities she could join, from thieves to scholars who study Torah. She is enticed to stay and make her home among them but even though she is woefully alone, she is compelled onward.
Annamae is the yin to Ani’s yang, the Fro to Ani’s To. Although her father has died, her family is stable, close knit, and loving. In spite of this, Annamae feels lonely and misunderstood and in search of a perfect companion who will make her feel, for the first time, whole. Besides the family friend Rav Harriett, no one can make heads or tails of what ails Annamae. She lives with the sense the world isn’t real, and that there is a “realer” world out there and a real friend who gets her stormier, tempestuous nature. She carries around a journal she calls “Company,” the name of Ani’s kitten on the other side of the adventure, and writes messages to an idealized person she has not yet met. She pastes on her wall a reproduction of M.C. Escher’s hand drawing a hand. “This is what Annamae had realized. No one could ever understand anybody. Not really….It was language’s fault. People mistook language for solid ground, when really it was just a net.” We feel the author butting up against language to evoke something deeper that lies beyond the words and beyond our world.
Ani gazes into mirrors and tries to imagine what is on the other side of her reflection. She travels and gathers clues along the way. At one point on her journey, finds herself at a “study house” where the discussion is Talmudic—full of disagreement, laughter, and a concentrated effort to make sense of the world. There Ani thinks, “For a moment then I understood that to understand would mean knowing parts of the story I could not ever know. How could I, when parts had yet to be born out of children’s children’s mouths? How could I, when it was so vast and I so little.”
The two sides of the book function like two ends of one stick. The search, in the end, is the discovery. The movement is both forward and regressive.
The reader will receive one sort of delight beginning the book at To but quite another beginning at Fro. To and Fro is a kabbalistic jewel of a coming-of-age story. On both sides is the childlike journey of the Fool, esoteric and mystical, with shades of Judaism throughout. They search for one another. They search for themselves.
Bethany Ball lives in New York where she’s at work on her third novel, The Resident Tower.
