Nancy Richler (1957–2018)

I loved this compelling story about identity: who we are, where we come from, and how that affects the choices we make and the people who care about us. Lily Azerov arrives in Montreal to marry a man she's never met -- a man who rejects her on sight. But, Lily isn't really who she claims to be, as is apparent to the real Lily's cousin. Who Lily really is doesn't matter much to some of the family she builds in Montreal. But it does matter profoundly to her daughter, Ruth, whose search for show more answers is discouraged by her father and grandmother.

I couldn't stop reading. Like Ruth, I needed to know Lily's true story. This book is well written and thoroughly engaging. show less

After the end of World War II, Lily Azerov arrives in Montreal to marry Sol Kramer, the marriage having been arranged by a matchmaker. Sol rejects his bride-to-be, but his brother Nathan steps in. Three months after the birth of their daughter Ruth, Lily abandons her husband and daughter. Ruth is raised by her father and a loving and protective extended family, but when gifts of rocks occasionally arrive from her mother, Ruth’s curiosity is peaked. Gradually she gathers bits and pieces of show more information about her long-lost parent.

The book is a daughter’s quest to uncover the truth about her mother. She soon discovers that Lily Azerov was not really her mother’s name; that was simply an identity she had stolen after the war. Ruth is told by an older relative that “’It wasn’t uncommon, after all, for a person to change her name if she had escaped death. It’s not a custom here, I know, but where we were from, if you recovered from a serious illness or escaped death in some way, it wasn’t thought to be a bad idea to change your name. To confuse death – you understand’” (289)?

Ruth’s attempts to unearth the truth about her mother points to a major theme of the novel: the need humans have to unearth the truths hidden in their past, even in the traumas of the past which occurred long before their existence. Ruth’s aunt speaks of this need: “’Our need to know where we come from, to connect it to who we are and where we’re going. That’s what makes us human, what sets us apart from all the other animals. . . . It’s origins and destiny – our obsession with that. That’s what defines us’” (234).

Another theme is the long-lasting psychological impact of war on successive generations. Lily is described as shattered and Ruth thinks of a teacup, “a white porcelain cup . . . that had shattered once from a fall . . . had been carefully repaired, but was too fragile now for the rigours of holding tea . . . . My mother was like that teacup, I had come to think. She could not withstand the rigours of the life she was trying to live” (123). She is not the only one damaged by war. Bella, Ruth’s paternal grandmother, and Ida Pearl, her uncle’s mother-in-law, suffered devastating loss and must learn how to survive.

Of course, some people have more difficulty than others with dealing with loss and moving on. Ida Pearl tells Ruth, “’We rely on our surroundings and the people who know us to remind us who we are. You think that who you are is written in stone and that if you were to be torn from your world and lung into another you’d land there the same Ruth Kramer you’ve always been. But you wouldn’t, believe me. I didn’t. Your grandmother didn’t. Your grandfather didn’t . . . ‘” (290). Ruth speculates that her mother lost “her very sense of self because the world that had formed and reflected that self back to her was destroyed” (290). Ruth, however, adapts rather too easily to her mother’s abandonment.

Another problem I had with the book is the use of chance and coincidence. What are the chances that a woman Lily meets in Montreal would be related to the woman whose identity Lily stole in Europe? Is it logical that in one extended family there would be five people who are abandoned by either a spouse or a parent?

This book was shortlisted for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize, but I’m not surprised it didn’t win. It is sufficiently interesting, but theme development depended too much on plot manipulation. show less

Let me preface this by saying this was not the book I picked up at the library to read. What I thought I was checking out was a romance - I'd been hit by a sudden nostalgia for my Harlequin days, and the back cover was intriguing. A deep and doomed love? A bride who is not only not who she claims to be, but one who flees, leaving behind husband and infant daughter? So, no, it wasn't the romance I expected. But it was a romance. Just one of a different sort.

I expected to read about Lily, and show more in some ways that's a fault of this novel. Lily is present almost entirely by her absence. She's pivotal, while all the while remaining benign. The story isn't even about the doomed love - in fact, I was hard pressed to divine that from what was given, even if one takes into account the filter of the bulk of the tale coming from her daughter, Ruth. No, the love story that is told is that of Ruth, and her absent mother. And, perhaps, by extension, all the women in this story and their relationships with others.

There are happy notes, sad ones, and poignant ones. Ones where the reader searches to understand the emotions that are there - and those that aren't. They're complex. Intricate. Woven out of experiences we glimpse at odd angles and struggle to compile over the entire novel, only to reach the end with a sense of completion, if not satisfaction. As with the entire novel, it is what it is, presented without inflection and left for us to divine.

Different, and beautiful. Sad, and lyrical. Much like the era the bulk of it is set in. Well worth the read. Well worth it. show less

I was really touched by this story of loss: loss of family, identity, history, human connection. Richler did a fantastic job at capturing the hectic and ignoble days at the war was brought to an end and still people had to fight to survive. It must have been a time of terrible confusion, looking for absent relatives, pulling bits of broken lives faced the horrible reality of having to reconstruct from scratch.
I found Lily to be an incredibly human character: we can neither judge her or call show more her out on her actions. She was simply trying to catch her bearings. Richler did a tremendous job of contrasting Canadians who stayed at home and saw the war from afar compared to the European who lived it all too closely. The realities are so different and there is always that gap in understanding.
The structure of the novel is also very clever: a soul-searching book but revealed, little by little, so that the reader cannot help but want to dig deeper into the past, looking for clues, trying to figure out if Lily is good or bad.
I was very much enthralled and taken by this story, one which I would very much recommend. show less