GLASS HEARTS
By Terri Paul
Academy Chicago Publishers, 326 pages, $24.95
There are plenty of familiar elements in “Glass Hearts”: a Jewish family in a small European town during World War I, young people at odds with tradition, a world that is about to disappear. Rich turns of phrase and colorful imagery evoke settings that are most familiar from the darkly humorous tales of Sholom Aleichem or Isaac Singer. But the simple and direct story-telling voice also brings to mind the “Little House” books of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Like Wilder’s tales of an American pioneer family, “Glass Hearts” is told through the insights of a child who perceives and misperceives the realities of love, death, faith and hardship. At the same time, elements of magic and embellishment echo traditional Jewish folk tales.
Terri Paul’s first novel, based on the early life of her aunt, has the authority of memoir infused with an artist’s imaginative vision. Overall, there is the poignant situation of an impoverished young family whose father has vanished. As narrated by Serene, who ages from 6 to 12 during the story, every new trial becomes an adventure, mined for its dramatic possibilities. Throughout the book, Serene’s encounters with witches, gypsies, ghosts and other odd figures help her develop strength, maturity and a talent for bringing people together.
Each character, whether a lead or a walk-on player, is delightfully idiosyncratic, sketched with a few well-chosen images. Serene’s sister, Mina, at 13, goes to any funeral she can get to. The mayor’s daughter is called Domino “because she had coal black hair and eyes and white skin and because all she had to do was push a little bit and one thing after another fell over in her path until she got whatever she wanted.” A snobbish wealthy woman is characterized by her choice of head covering, “not like Gradma’s wig, which looked as if it had been pieced together with straw. . . . The front formed a perfect wave, and not a single strand was out of place. The hair was dark and shiny, and I thought the wig was the most wonderful thing I had ever seen. It was too bad Mrs. Kaufman wore such a sour expression on her face because it spoiled her beautiful hair.”
But the precisely detailed characters, their actions and dialogue do not necessarily result in an exact understanding of the events of Serene’s life. Near the book’s middle, Rosa, Serene’s mother, tells her that she decided years ago that “facts are slippery. They change with the teller.” That far into the story, readers will surely recognize this sentiment as the novel’s organizing principle. The facts of Serene’s childhood surface in vivid flashes, but the hows and whys of events shift and sift, slippery, through Serene’s memory, dreams and naivete.
In this way it makes perfect sense that Serene, running awayfrom her nasty grandmother one night, is assaulted and robbed at knifepoint by a gypsy woman she has met, even when we are quite certain the assailant is not the same woman at all. Moments later, Serene’s father appears and whispers encouragement in her ear, despite the fact that he has been missing for years. This is not magical realism exactly, but a close approximation of the way a child perceives through a haze of inconceivable incidents.
The truly inexplicable is delineated more specifically. For example, after Serene’s infant sister recovers from an illness so dire that their mother had already bought a small coffin, they plant roses in the unused box:
“The first blooms were yellow like the pale sun in the early summer sky. The second blooms were the same purple as the ribbons on Uncle Mihai’s uniform, and the last ones were as red as the blood that ran in our veins and bound our family together. All from that one magical bush. . . . (P)eople from around the village came to tell us that no single plant could bring forth so many wonderful colors.”
While Serene’s attack is experienced through confusion and fear, open to a reader’s interpretation, who could doubt the authenticity of her memory of those magically hued roses?
As the story proceeds, its magical elements diminish, perhaps reflecting Serene’s greater maturity during the family’s most difficult years. They are forced to flee their Hungarian town after it is invaded and annexed by Romania. At this point Serene’s limited perspective becomes a handicap to the novel. During the family’s exile, it is her sister Mina’s story that offers more dramatic possibilities as she struggles rebelliously through a torrent of religious and romantic crises that are never fully explained nor resolved beyond Serene’s understanding of them.
Ultimately, the book regains its charm as the family falls into better circumstances and immigrates to America. Their voyage west is richly entertaining, particularly the story of a suit made from a horse blanket, which mirrors the beginning of a transition from Old World to New. At the end, the family is in New York, where Serene is confronted by a spectacle that not too subtly manages to unify every element of the book. The final image reveals that magic can exist in the New World too.
