Leah Hager Cohen

Grief is quiet and consuming and solitary but it eats away at happiness and connection like an acid. In Leah Hager Cohen's exqusite new novel, grief is smothering the tiny flicker of life left in the Ryrie family. John and Ricky's marriage is failing as they mourn the loss of their infant son a year previously. Not only can they not find their way back to each other, but they cannot find their way to helping their older children, 13 year old Paul, a target of bullying, and 9 year old show more Elizabeth, called Biscuit, who is skipping school regularly and obsessed with cultural death rituals. The loss of Simon, born with anancephaly and only living 57 hours past his birth, magnifies the existing cracks in the Ryrie family. And the collective silence about his existence and death serves to split the cracks wide open. Into this struggling house comes Jess, John's oldest daughter and the product of a prior relationship. She is in her early twenties, single, and pregnant. Her presence complicates evyerthing and highlights the happier time years before when, as a young teenager, she vacationed with the Ryries.

The narrative follows each of the six main characters, getting into their heads and showing the different ways in which their grief and longing cripples them. Each of the characters, the four Ryries, Jess, and Gordie, a young man reeling from his own father's death and introduced to the Ryries through Biscuit, is complete and realistic. While some of the decisions made by the characters, John and Ricky in particular, are hard to understand, the truth and burden of their individual mourning make the decisions real and wrenching, especially when seen in the context of the family and in the impact on each of the other, equally needy, characters. The narrative timeline moves back and forth from the present, capturing the months before Simon's birth and immediately following as well as eight years prior when Jess last spent time with the Ryries. This allows the reader to see into the heart of the familial relationships to their very core, even before grief so overwhelmed them.

Cohen's writing is simply gorgeous, filled with amazing descriptions that take your breath away. She has effectively isolated her characters from each other even when they need each other the most and it is impossible to feel anything but deepest sorrow at their very alone-ness. That each of them is profoundly lonely and incapable of re-establishing long frayed bonds is overwhelming and adds to the pervasive sadness of the story above and beyond the loss of a baby. The characters' very secrets hold them at arms length from each other, husband from wife, parents from children, Ryries from family outsiders, and the revelation of their deepest beliefs will change their lives forever. While it is hard to comprehend the remoteness of the characters, Cohen has done a marvelous job drawing these broken people who have lost the ability to trust and to nurture and to make a family. Absorbing and effecting, this was a moving novel about loss and secrets and family and trust and the struggle to emerge from grief not unchanged but whole. show less

To & Fro is a remarkably unique book; it's two mirrored stories bound together, and can be read in either order, with each story "ending" in the middle. I started with "To," which features a young girl, Ani, who sets off on a journey, ostensibly following the Captain. The other story, "Fro," is about Annamae, a girl growing up with her mother and older brother Danny in Manhattan.

Serious Annamae has a deep interiority; she writes and draws constantly in a notebook she calls "Company," or show more Coco for short, from age 7 until about 12. This notebook seems to be the very one that Ani sets out to return to the Captain, along with his glasses; on Ani's journey, she brings an apricot-colored kitten, which she names Company, and she overhears a song - the lyrics of which are a poem Annamae wrote in her notebook.

More mirroring: Both Ani and Annamae each find a "ferryman": in Ani's case, a man who brings people across the river in a ferry, to Tewanfrough (to and fro); Annamae used to address letters to a "fairy man" but when she gets older, a bar and restaurant called the Ferryman opens on her street.

Both are fascinated with letters - "signs and wonders" - and study, after a fashion, the Torah and its commentary. To & Fro itself is full of signs and wonders, deep thinking, and a strong connection to what it's like to be a child, and begin growing out of childhood.

WaPo review: https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/05/21/to-fro-leah-hager-cohen-book/

Quotes from "To"

"No one's not broken in some way or other." (Cook to Ani, 22)

I like pretending objects are a kind of book. That they can be read. I like making up stories about them. Where they came from, whose hands used them, where they might be headed next. (52)

"A messenger doesn't have to understand the message. A messenger just has to receive it." (Ottla to Ani, 117)

Who can say what's beyond repair? (118)

[The notebook] had become like a song whose words I didn't know but whose tune I could hum. (147)

...and because I could not leave her, because maybe the old story didn't have to determine the new, because maybe I could invent a different story this time, I stayed. (155)

In a story riddled with holes, a single newfound scrap can have the power to recast the others. (158)

What I felt was, This has not happened to me only.
Maybe stories don't make things happen, but maybe through stories we find we are not alone. (170)

From "Fro"

"[A contranym] is a word with two opposite meanings." (Annamae's mom, 36)

"No two people can ever know the exact same thing!" (Annamae to her mom, 82)

"Questions of curiosity" vs. "questions of agenda" (98)

This was what Annamae had realized. No one could ever understand anybody. Not really.
They were all doomed.
Doomed not to understand one another.
Worse: doomed to go around thinking they were understanding one another, thinking they were being understood.
It was language's fault. People mistook language for solid ground, when really it was just a net. (119)

[The story of Akhnai's Oven, 166-167]

And yet she wondered...might it be possible to create something beyond your control? To imagine something into being that yet had a life of its own, an unruliness, an ability to disobey, perhaps to invent you in return? (183) show less

My book club and I were pretty much in unison on this one: so much ado about ... what? The author seems to be working her way through a checklist of "contemporary fiction to-dos" ... eccentric family, prodigal son, dark family secret = check! Gender fluid characters, interracial romance, environmental activism, free range parenting = check! "Ripped from the headlines" subplot (a religious group poised to transform an established old town - will the community welcome them or close ranks?) = show more check! Whimsical ancestral home, precocious kid, and a bit with an animal = check! ... without bothering to connect these disparate narrative elements into any kind of cohesive whole.

The result is a story that has a lot going on but not much happening ... which can be okay if the author creates characters that you're vested in, but that doesn't happen here either because Cohen seems to believe that endowing characters with imaginative idiosyncrasies - a husband who loves baking, a wife who grooves on being fertile, a daughter who's into avant garde theater, a little kid who fancies himself a military scout - is enough to make them fully realized and endearing, but of course it's not. And maybe it's just me, but authors who employ third person limited narration shouldn't endow their characters with anachronistic perspectives and vocab just so the author can show off their wit and wokeness. Totally undermines any authenticity the author is attempting to establish.

I hung in there until the end because I kept thinking that something must be coming - some revelation or narrative twist that would tie all these meandering subplots together - but that never happens and now I kind of regret the time I spent on this, time I could have spent on something with more authenticity, depth, and genuine empathy. show less

Once upon a time, I thought it would be wonderful to learn sign language. I never really got beyond the alphabet in the Girl Scout Handbook, aside from learning some quite rude signs from Instagram, but I remain fascinated by the language. Because of that fascination, somewhere along the way I picked up Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World by Leah Hager Cohen, thinking to read and learn more about the deaf community but I let the book languish on my shelves for ages. While some of it is show more unfortunately quite dated now (published in 1994), it still gives an interesting and thought-provoking look into a community and culture I've read very little about, and interacted with even less.

At the time of her writing of the book, Cohen's father Oscar was the superintendent of the Lexington School for the Deaf in New York so Cohen herself spent quite a lot of time in or adjacent to the deaf community, although as a hearing child she didn't attend the school or learn ASL herself until adulthood. She had a unique entre into the deaf community via her father and via her paternal grandparents, both of whom were deaf. The book jumps around touching on a variety of topics, from the politics, debates, and discussions within the deaf community (students and staff at Gallaudet University had just successfully protested against a hearing president) to the fears that things like the pressure to mainstream deaf children instead of maintaining dedicated schools and the push towards cochlear implants would lead to an erasure of deaf culture. She presents the arguments for and against ASL, signed exact English, and vocalization without offering a value judgment on any of them as options in the world. She discusses sign language interpreting, including her own experience learning to interpret, and considers how interpreters are not native speakers of sign language, presenting challenges that most hearing people wouldn't ever have thought about (I sure hadn't!). She shares tales of her own deaf grandparents, telling of both the difficulties (and tragedies) and the joys in their lives in a hearing world. And finally, she weaves stories of two students at the school throughout the rest of her narrative, sharing the extra challenges that James, whose family is economically disadvantaged, and Sophia, whose family is non-native English speaking, face as they work toward their high school degrees and toward a future that they are just starting to envision.

The book hops back and forth between all of Cohen's focuses, which can be a bit choppy but the information she presents is consistently interesting. She draws the attention of hearing readers to issues and concerns that they've probably never spared even one second of time thinking about, and has presented the needs and wants of the deaf community, which is not a monolith, in a balanced and thoughtful manner. There's history and personal stories both in this detailed and engaging non-fiction book. People who want insight into a people and community they probably don't have much knowledge about will learn a lot from this book, and yet leave it with a lot to think about. show less