Secret Anniversaries of the Heart
I don’t think I’m the kind of person anyone really imagines would read Lev Raphael’s story collection Secret Anniversaries of the Heart. Or perhaps I should say, when the marketing department at Leapfrog Press got together (I’m imagining a couple of guys and a six pack) to discuss their target audience or likely readership, I probably didn’t make the list.
There is some justification for this—the overwhelming reason people like a book is because they like, or think they are like, or perhaps wish they were more like its main characters. It was one of my greatest hurdles when I was a bookseller—trying to convince people to read a book about somebody they didn’t think they would want to know.
Secret Anniversaries of the Heart is a strongly-themed collection of stories that deals with issues of Jewish identity, the loss and finding of faith, growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust, coming of age and homosexual identity, and the insidious nature of anti-Semitism and homophobia. These are stories about what it is to be Jewish in a culture that consigns Jews forever to the realm of the exotic and foreign. What it means to be religious in an era that is materialistic and spiritually barren. What it means to be homosexual in a country where the veneer of tolerance is sometimes as thin as the membrane around the yolk of an egg, and what it means to live in the shadow of a horror so great its victims will never again be at peace.
These stories explore what it is to be a young, gay, Jewish, and the child of Holocaust survivors.
I am almost none of those things. I was raised solidly middle class. We weren’t religious. When I asked my parents about God, they told me I could decide what to believe when I was older and made up my own mind—as if belief in God was simply a scientific theory to be proved by the weight of the evidence. We were blandly free of religious identity, ethnic identity, and all the rituals that accompany such self-definition. My father managed to avoid the draft in perfectly legal ways. There were no horrors in my life or theirs. No past shadows blocking out the present sun. In fact, I am very much what various characters in Raphael’s collection refer to as typical Amerikanski—a generic group of privileged, spoilt people who have no idea what real trouble looks like.
The only things I have in common with any of the protagonists of the stories are a general love of literature (several of the characters in the book are fixated on Henry James or Edith Wharton in a way that I can wholly appreciate) and the fact that I’m gay. But that last isn’t as strong a commonality as you might think—I can empathize with the young men in Raphael’s stories as they come to terms with their awakening sexuality, but the strong thighs, large hands and wide shoulders they desire don’t exactly float my boat, you know? The finer points of male beauty are usually lost on me. I have the same reaction to a group of men that I do when having to pick out a pair of sneakers—none of them look any better than the others. They all just look like sneakers.
The impressive thing about Secret Anniversaries is that none of all that matters. This is, among many other things, simply good fiction and like all good fiction it breaches our self-imposed limits and identities and truly lets us into another person’s life. Which is, after all, the whole point of fiction.
The story collection is culled from a quietly impressive literary career spanning twenty-five years or more. Despite the apparently narrow focus of the stories, the breadth of emotional territory they cross is staggering. The collection starts off with a bang in its first piece, “The Tanteh”, as a young boy attempts to understand the silences that envelope a great aunt, a survivor of the War, who is, not exactly beloved, but a source of compelling fascination. As stepping off points go, the Tanteh’s self-contained fury at her nephew’s persistent intrusiveness into the past is a pretty high one. But each following story rises even higher. The author is good at setting a scene, has a generous sense of humor that bursts forth at unexpected moments (he seems to have it in for the television show Will and Grace), and he has an obvious ear for dialogue. But Raphael’s greatest gift is his ability to create emotional and psychological complexity within the space of a few short, simple sentences:
Ira’s father had an odd, stubborn way of standing: His hands were inevitably in his pockets and all of him seemed to lean forward, as if he’d placed himself in your path and the next move was up to you.”
Each new story turns another facet of the characters’ quest for identity to the light. “Doesn’t it bother you?” asks one young man of his lover “pretending to be something that you are not?” He is talking about the fact that there is a Christmas tree in the hall, not that they are gay.
One doesn’t need to be gay to understand the breathless desire some of the young men feel for their college roommates. One doesn’t need to be Jewish to feel the sense of peace some of the characters find in Temple rituals and prayers. And readers certainly don’t have to have a connection with war to feel the suffocation of living with such a horror as the Holocaust constantly in the background—rarely mentioned but always present. The author sees to it that the reader feels all these things, viscerally. He is too good a writer to let his readers off the hook with platitudes.
But he is never dogmatic. Raphael leaves it to the reader to see, for example, the uncomfortable parallels between anti-Semitism and homophobia. He rarely lectures, despite the fact that many of his characters are university students with the penchant for political speeches young students often possess. (Students come off rather well in his stories—I suspect he has a kind of affection for young people all excited to learn things). But we are left with no illusions about the damage such hate can cause—both the institutionalized and the internalized forms. One of the common themes among all the stories is how people attempt to heal the internalized scars and shame that come from living under persistent fear and hate. In a few stories they fail, and violence erupts suddenly. It is all the more startling and frightening to the reader because when it happens it isn’t gay-bashers or skinheads who end up causing the most harm. That would be easy and clean. Instead, it is almost always a result of someone’s internalized shame exploding outwards with deadly impartiality. The young man, his family, his lover and a few Amerikanski who happens to be in its path all suffer for it.
For all its dark themes and explorations, though, Secret Anniversaries of the Heart has an optimistic feel. I hesitate to use the word “redemptive”, but there is certainly a strong faith in the stories that some things do triumph. Love, for example. The young men and women (there are a few stories told in a female voice) who decide to pursue these questions of identity despite resistance from their families, or the obstacles of unspoken past horrors, seem to draw strength from even beginning the journey. It isn’t always an easy path, but it is always better than refusing the quest.