by Alison Pick
AP: While writing Far to Go I was also taking notes for my next book, which is something I haven’t done before, but the material was presenting itself and I didn’t want to lose it. It’s a memoir about a depression I experienced while I was exploring my family’s lost Judaism. So, yes, I’ve technically started, and have hundreds of pages of rough notes. The key word being “rough.” This fall I’ll be busy teaching at the Banff Centre, promoting Far to Go, and hanging out with my baby, so it’ll probably be 2011 by the time I’m able to actually sit down and start shaping the notes into an actual book. I’m looking forward to it, though, I must admit. There’s nothing like the feeling of seeing a new project take shape, form itself from scribbles and half-thoughts into something with narrative arc and coherence.
In Search of the Past
Originally published in Quill & Quire magazine, September 2010. Reprinted with permission.
Alison Pick explores her family’s hidden traditions in a novel about war and Jewish identity.
By Micah Toub
ALISON PICK pulls some papers out of her bag and passes them to me across the table. They’re worn and stained, though she tells me the document is only a few years old. “This is something my dad did,” she says as I look over the printout of an Excel spreadsheet. We’re chatting on the patio of her regular coffee spot, a block away from her home in Toronto’s Annex. About ten pages in total, the papers record the story of her grandparents’ escape from Czechoslovakia during the Second World War through an analysis of the various stamps and notes made in the couple’s joint passport.
The first entry reveals that her grandfather was in Egypt on a business trip when the Nazis marched into the Czech Sudetenland along the country’s border regions on October 1, 1938. He never returned to his homeland. The spreadsheet then shows how, over the next three years, he and his wife travelled, separately and together, through Europe and the Middle East—Italy, Greece, Palestine, and elsewhere—attempting to secure safe passage from Europe.
They eventually did get out, making their way from London to Trinidad and then up to Canada. But when they finally settled in Sherbrooke, Quebec, in 1941, they had left something behind—their religion.
“They decided to raise my dad and uncle and not tell them they were Jewish,” Pick says, explaining that her paternal grandparents, traumatized by the war and by the loss of her grandmother’s parents in Nazi camps, pretended to be Christian as they melded into their new society. And although Pick’s father did eventually come across enough clues to figure out his true heritage, he and his wife—a Christian—decided to raise Pick and her sister in a secular home.
Now, almost seventy years after the Picks’ arrival in Canada, their granddaughter is publishing a novel that is not only likely to be the thirty-four-year-old’s breakout book, but that also coincides with a personal breakthrough—the reclaiming of her cultural heritage for herself and her family.
Far to Go (House of Anansi Press), Pick’s follow-up to her 2005 debut novel The Sweet Edge, centres on the lives of a Jewish Czech family during and after the Munich Agreement of 1938, when the Allies of Europe allowed Germany to annex Czechoslovakia. Although Pick did not model the characters directly on her ancestors, researching the book allowed her to explore her Jewish roots, a topic that has been on her mind for the last decade.
“My grandmother died in 2000,” she says, “and I think my dad felt that after she was gone there wasn’t the same need to protect her.” The open conversations Pick had with her father about their Judaism inspired some of the material in her first book of poetry, Question & Answer, published in 2002.
More recently, Pick’s questions encouraged her father to continue with his own research, which in turn fed Far to Go. He tracked down half a dozen unpublished memoirs by survivors who lived in Czechoslovakia during the time of the Munich Agreement, which Pick says helped her paint the day-to-day lives of the fictional Bauers, a family torn apart emotionally and physically by the war. Her father also introduced her to the retired manager of a textile factory her grandfather started in Sherbrooke. The meeting provided one of the principal inspirations for the book.
“He was also Jewish and had a son—a little five-year-old—who managed to get out of Czechoslovakia on one of the Kindertransports,” Pick explains. “He showed me a set of letters which are written from his biological parents in Prague to the family that adopted him in Scotland.” In one of the letters, the mother meekly shares with her son’s caretaker the details of his sleeping routine, what he likes to eat, and how to rub his back to calm him at night. “They’re just heartbreaking, super heartbreaking letters,” says Pick.
In Far to Go, the Bauers’ son, Pepik, is sent to Scotland on a Kindertransport, eventually ending up in Canada, where he starts a new life on his own. Although this is not the story of Pick’s ancestors, the disconnection between generations represents her lost traditions. Meanwhile, the novel’s present-day narrator, who records the stories of these now elderly castaway children in interstitial chapters, reflects Pick’s recent embrace of her Jewish roots. “The process of getting to sink into that time and place over the three years it took me to write the book made me feel closer to them,” Pick says of her paternal grandparents. “It had always been said to me that Judaism wasn’t that important to them. But while researching I met with a cousin of my grandfather’s, and she told me he’d said before the war, ‘I would not convert to Christianity if I were the last Jew on Earth.’ And I put that line in the book.”
Last year, Pick officially converted to Judaism. The path that led to her conversion started in 2007, when her husband landed a job at the Michener Institute, bringing them from Newfoundland—where they’d been living for five years—to Toronto. It was something of a homecoming for Pick, whose parents live an hour away in Kitchener, Ontario, where she was raised.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the idea took root in a very literary setting. “I was at the Griffin Poetry Prize, and I’d had a couple drinks and asked Michael Redhill about the Jewish community in Toronto,” Pick tells me, explaining that Redhill (a novelist and Anansi-published poet) took her across the room and introduced her to another Anansi-published poet, Adam Sol. “Adam’s wife is a rabbi and she was there, too, and we had a really great conversation,” Pick says.
After that night, Rabbi Splansky—Sol’s wife—became Pick and her husband’s mentor as they educated themselves about Judaism, meeting with them once a month and encouraging them to enroll in a year-long class for would-be converts at the Holy Blossom Temple, a Reform synagogue.
It wasn’t until Pick became pregnant with her first child, however, that she decided to officially enter the faith. “Our daughter is going to have a complex religious identity, but we wanted it to be as open and clear as possible,” says Pick, who describes her conversion as more about wanting to integrate cultural practices like Shabbat and high holiday celebrations back into her family, as opposed to a change in her religious beliefs.
Thus, like a good novel, several of the narrative threads in Pick’s life converged in spring 2009. While pregnant with her daughter, Ayla, Pick completed her conversion within months of finishing her manuscript, which was promptly acquired by Anansi’s then-publisher Lynn Henry.
Pick and Henry have a long history together. Their working relationship began with Question & Answer, when Henry was an editor at Raincoast Books. The Sweet Edge came next, but when Henry was laid off from Raincoast and landed at Anansi in 2005, Pick followed. Then, just as Henry finished editing Far to Go, she moved again, this time becoming publishing director at Doubleday Canada.
Henry’s departure raises the question: where will Pick’s next book be published? “I love Anansi and I love Lynn Henry,” Pick says judiciously when I ask about her next project. Meanwhile, Anansi president Sarah MacLachlan, who has since taken over the role of publisher, says, “A publishing house is about group enthusiasm. A single person cannot do what a whole publishing house does for a book. So yes, we w
ant to hold on to Alison Pick.”
Pick’s agent, Anne McDermid, views either possibility as a win. “Lynn and Alison have one of those wonderful author-editor relationships that you always want and don’t always necessarily get,” she says. “They really understand each other.” But McDermid also feels Anansi would make a good permanent home. “What we find with Anansi is that, because they are so small and have few authors, they behave like a family,” she says. “If you’re on their list, everybody in the company is behind you. And that’s certainly the case with Alison.”
What happens next for Pick is an open question. Busy raising her daughter, now a year old, Pick doesn’t anticipate beginning something new until next year at the earliest. However, when pressed, she lets slip that her next project is most likely going to be a nonfiction book about her relationship with her father’s cultural background and faith. “It’s just a bunch of rough notes, several notebooks of rough notes at this point,” she says. “If I do go forward with it, it’ll be a very hard, personal book that might end up being a lot scarier than this one.”
And so, after completing a novel that was generations in the making, Alison Pick’s journey may be just beginning.
Read on
Further Reading and Viewing
Reading
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, edited by Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer
Pearls of Childhood: The Poignant True Wartime Story of a Young Girl Growing Up in an Adopted Land, by Vera Gissing
Hanna’s Diary, 1938–1941: Czechoslovakia to Canada, by Hanna Spencer
Letters from Prague 1939–1941, compiled by Raya Czerner Shapiro and Helga Czerner Weinberg
The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond the Kindertransport: A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival, by Mona Golabek and Lee Cohen
Viewing
The Power of Good: Nicholas Winton
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport
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Copyright
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FAR TO GO. Copyright © 2010 by Alison Pick.
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FIRST U.S. EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-06-203462-5
EPub Edition © APRIL 2011 ISBN: 9780062034632
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