The nature of suffering

Author Linda Grant's new work deals with the trials of Jewish immigrants in '70s Britain.

By ORI GOLAN
Linda Grant book 88 224 (photo credit: Courtesy )
Linda Grant book 88 224
(photo credit: Courtesy )
The Clothes on Their Backs By Linda Grant Virago Press 293 pages; $21.61 When I arrange to meet Linda Grant, I suddenly recall some wise advice an editor gave me many years ago. A good rule of life, he said, is never, never, meet writers you admire. I have admired Grant's writing for some time now, first reading her award-winning work of fiction When I Lived in Modern Times and then her autobiographical account of her mother's dementia, Remind Me Who I Am, Again. So the prospect of meeting her makes me rather apprehensive. I also fret about what to wear, given the amount of research and detail she has invested into the subject of clothes. As it turns out, my apprehension is unfounded. I could have turned up in my pajamas, I suspect, and she would not have minded. At 57, Grant is what you might describe as a no-frills kind of person; the kind who inspires trust. Like a favorite aunt whom you can confide in. Or the type who would strike up a conversation with a stranger in an elevator. Our conversation takes place in a patisserie in North London, a short walk from where she lives. On the way, I ask her about The Archers - Britain's longest-running radio drama. She does not appear to be in the least bit surprised and proceeds to fill me in on the diverse calamities to have befallen the characters during my four-year absence from the UK. Once inside the café, the waiter informs us that they have no honey, only marmalade, to go with the croissant. "In that case, forget it." she replies. "Marmalade... how weird," she says to no one in particular. I had just finished reading Grant's latest novel, The Clothes on Their Backs, which has been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize of 2008. I did it in one sitting - quite literally (during a 20-hour flight from Sydney to London) and the characters were still whirling in my head. The story is set in '70s Britain and follows Vivien Kovacs, daughter of Hungarian immigrants, and her quest to unravel the mystery that is her uncle, Sándor Kovaks - a shady character whom she first encounters when he turns up at the family home with a Toblerone bar for her but is angrily turned away by his brother, Ervin, Vivien's father. All attempts to find out about her uncle are muted by her parents who refuse to discuss him, or their family background. Or anything, really. They are a mousy kind of people: keeping themselves to themselves, grateful to the country that offered them shelter and eager to go unnoticed. Sándor, on the other hand, is a bon viveur, a pimp and a slum landlord whose scruples leave much to be desired. It is only a chance - and rather improbable - encounter on a park bench that brings Vivien and her uncle together many years later, when he comes out of prison. She becomes his secretary, transcribing his life story which he first dictates to a recording machine which both find complicated to operate. In the course of their interviews Vivien confronts her family's past, attempts to piece the composite jigsaw and tests her own values, particularly in relation to evil and morality and the space between them. The Clothes on Their Backs is an account of a family with secrets and silences. It is also an odyssey into the past and a search for an identity. It offers a glimpse into the lives of Jewish immigrants to Britain and the struggles and complexities of survival. What it doesn't offer is closure or redemption. "There is no resolution in the book," concurs Grant. "In most people's lives there is no resolution. I was not interested in that; what I was interested in is to look back on this period and at the survivors. I think that there has always been a very interesting question of Jewish émigrés, asylum seekers, refugees and how they reinvent themselves." Sándor's character is loosely based on the life and times of Peter Rachman, a Jewish survivor of a Siberian labor camp, who owned numerous mansion blocks and several seedy nightclubs in London of the 1960s. In a bid to maximize his income, and by means of intimidation, he drove out the sitting tenants who had statutory protection against rent increase. He then subdivided his properties, packing them with immigrants from the West Indies, in appalling conditions, charging extortionate rent. The story is not autobiographical and does not follow any of the landmarks of her own life. But it does follow a theme running throughout her fiction work: that of the outsider and the search for identity. "My grandparents came to this country as adults. They spoke Yiddish at home and only broken English. My parents were not interested in the past; what they were profoundly interested in is the future. They have no interest in their parents' past or where they had came from. And then you get my generation, the third generation, which is curious to find out where their grandparents were born and what life was like for them." HOWEVER, BY her own account, the novel delves deeper, attempting to grapple with a decidedly more complex issue. "At the heart of the book is the question I have been thinking about for quite a long time and it relates directly to Israel. There is no Israel in this book. The word Palestine is mentioned once, and there are no Zionists. This is very deliberate. One of the things that has really engaged and preoccupied me over the past eight years is the question which often comes up in debates: How could the Jews who went through the Holocaust behave like that toward the Palestinians? "To me, this displays a very superficial understanding of the nature of suffering. So much of the literature and film on the Holocaust show the destruction of innocence: the concert pianist, the guiltless child, the pious man, the precocious diarist. But it isn't the just the nice people who survive, it isn't just the saints or altruistic. As we know, there were also thieves, adulterers and murderers. I wanted to examine this seemingly sentimental notion that survivors are nice, good people." It is a detached, almost academic, line of inquiry. Grant makes no attempt to assign judgment to the moral or political consequences of survivors' actions. She is simply observing what actually happens to them - the transformation in their personalities. The author draws no conclusions and offers no advice on this weighty question. The Clothes on Their Backs is an immensely readable book that throws you into the heart of the story from the first page. It is the story of a family in turmoil, the kind that seethes very quietly just underneath the surface. There is revenge, hate, resignation and old scores. Suspense hovers above the pages. Grant uses flashback, generational gaps and metaphors to throw the reader from one side to the other. One gets the feeling of seeing the scene, as if on stage, from different angles: Vivien just wants to know; her parents just want to forget; the uncle wants to rewrite the script. In parts, however, the narrative takes a few quantum leaps of credulity. Sándor, the womanizer, wheeler and dealer, is not the type to sit on a park bench where the fateful encounter between uncle and niece takes place. On a linguistic level, there are direct quotes from Vivien's parents, Hungarian immigrants not of the bookish variety, whose English may have been conversant, but not fluent or idiomatic, which take on an implausible register. Examples abound: "goes to rack and ruin," "backed to the hilt," "by a long chalk," are just some random examples which sound incongruous. HOW DID she come up with the title, and what's this thing about clothes? "The title comes from the famous refugee statements that they came with just the clothes on their back," she says. Throughout the narrative, clothes are used as metaphor or indicators; they define her characters, transform them, separate them and empower them. In one part there is a harrowing description of Sándor leaving for work camp wearing one of his dapper suits, which he never takes off, and by the end of his captivity, no longer resembled clothes, but a kind of fungus excreted by his skin. As soon as he is free, he is once again in search of flashy suits. "But it's also about survival," Grant continues. "It's about how the immigrants can reinvent themselves through clothes. I suppose it's a very Jewish thing. My grandparents thought that clothes were terribly important. They were how people judged you and were tied in with self respect." And there are still more clothes to come. Already she has launched into her next project - a non-fiction book called The Thoughtful Dresser, the muse to which, she says, she found while writing of The Clothes on Their Backs, and tells the story of an extraordinary woman in Toronto who survived Auschwitz to become the owner of an exclusive fashion store. Grant's literary works have already brought her much fame and accolade, alongside a slew of prizes. She has won the Orange Prize for When I Lived in Modern Times, the Lettre Ulysses Prize for Literary Reportage for her reporting from Israel, and the Mind Book of the Year for her book Remind Me Who I Am, Again. So is all this beginning to be a little "old hat"? "No, no," she dismisses me. "The Booker is the big one. The Booker and the Nobel Prize," she laughs. Indeed, the Man Booker prize guarantees prestige, hikes in sales and translations rights all over the world. Grant's work has been translated into more than a dozen languages, including Turkish and Chinese. "Guess which language my books have never been translated into," she challenges me. I am flummoxed when she tells me. "Yes, nothing of mine has ever been published in Hebrew. Israel is the final frontier for me as a writer." As we prepare to go, I ask her if I may take a photo of her. "No way," she insists, running her hand on her blue cardigan. "Not in this."