The last bookmark of 2010, installed at the northwest corner of College and Manning in Toronto on October 28, may bear a small passage from Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces, her award-winning novel about finding love and faith in the face of tremendous loss, but its significance goes far beyond the materiality of the ceramic plaque and its small sample of text.
For Michaels, it’s the act of creating a physical space for our stories, rooting them there and breathing new life into them with each passerby who approaches the plaque and ponders what it means.
“There are stories everywhere. Not only that, they are part of our everyday life, and they are not separate from going about our business every day,” Michaels said. “To see where a story takes place on the street is fantastic.”
With passion in her voice and expression, Michaels went on to say, “This literature is ours. It belongs to us. And putting it right on the street just drives the point home. “
This sense of belonging is significant in an area known as Toronto’s Little Italy, now home to many people who settled here before and after the War.
“It’s a cliché, the immigrant reality of the City,” Michaels said. “But I was so conscious as a child, surrounded by immigrants from everywhere, of how profound the influence of the War was in terms of people coming to the City.
“And so I was so happy that this bookmark could be in a neighbourhood that has seen wave after wave of immigration. It’s a perfect core sample of what has been happening in the City for so long.”
Jakob Beer, Fugitive Pieces’ protagonist, who is himself displaced from his homeland, struggles to find a place for his memories, mostly of his sister Bella in Poland playing the piano and losing her when his house was stormed by Nazi soldiers.
Expressing himself in English, a language Bella never knew, is “what [Jakob] begins to feel is a faith of language,” Michaels explained.
“And there is one moment in the novel where he understands that he can begin to speak about the things that were unbearable because he’s speaking in a language in which those events did not happen. He’s speaking in a language foreign to the language in which those events occurred in, if I can put it that way.”
By simultaneously internalizing and externalizing his trauma through the act of writing in a foreign language, Jakob finds a space for his stories in the world.
“I think just the act of writing is to hold the reader close into territory, which is sometimes extremely painful, extremely difficult, and into material which is intensely beautiful," Michaels said. “But that closeness of the reader is a desire to have that communal relationship. And that is an act of faith, I think.
“And so, for him, that is the saving grace, really, that language allows him to speak of what he never thought he would be able to speak of.”
In the second half of the novel, Michaels solidifies the connection between the writer and the reader in shifting the first person voice to Ben, a man who is deeply affected by Jakob’s writing, his parents being survivors of the Holocaust themselves. He even goes to Greece to retrieve Jakob’s journals after his death and awakens his memory there by reading and contemplating his work.
There was a sense at this last unveiling of 2010 for Fugitive Pieces that bringing stories to street level is a way to bring this connection between writer and reader to the surface of our literary consciousness.
Standing amongst a large crowd on the busy street corner, it become clear what Michaels meant when she said, “These stories are our stories.”
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
About the Author:
Anne Michaels is the author of three highly acclaimed poetry collections: The Weight of Oranges (1986), which won the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas; Miner’s Pond (1991), which received the Canadian Authors Association Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award (these two volumes were published in a single-volume edition in 1997); and Skin Divers (1999).
Fugitive Pieces (1996) is Anne Michaels' multi-award-winning, internationally bestselling first novel. In Canada, it was #1, and on the national bestseller list for more than two years. The literary prizes the novel has garnered to date are: In Canada, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award; the City of Toronto Book Award; the Martin & Beatrice Fischer Award; the Trillium Book Award; and an Award of Merit from Heritage Toronto. In the U.K., the Guardian Fiction Award; the Jewish Quarterly Prize for Fiction; and the Orange Prize for Fiction. In the U.S., the Harold Ribalow Award and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. And in Italy, Giuseppe Acerbi Literary Award.
Photograph of Anne Michaels by Marzena Pogorzaly
The Literary Landmark for Michaels' Fugitive Pieces coming soon!
Post new comment