Articles

Personal histories are often the hardest books to analyze; after all, they are a person's real life, and that person cannot be judged by the same standards as an author who tells a fictional story. Yet there are good biographies and bad ones, and some are worth the telling, while others make us wish the author had felt the need to write a little less. Vivian Jeanette Kaplan's "Ten Green Bottles" is one of those personal narratives that blends a powerful story with powerful storytelling. This is the tale of the author's mother, written in the first person, narrating her family's escape from Nazi-occupied Vienna to Shanghai, and from there to Toronto. It is a small history lesson, a first-person view of what Jewish families were subjected to in their own homeland, and a journey that seems almost fictional in the family's ability to stay together, stay alive and stay reasonable healthy. The writing blends fictional and non-fictional styles, beginning with the author's technique of using her mother Nini's voice in the first person. It is almost as though she had made up a character to tell an extremely painful story, because she was unable to relate it without some degree of separation. This technique makes the story very intimate, as though we were watching a daughter and mother in private conversation. The book reads as though this were the first time the daughter had heard of her mother's journey from her beloved homeland to war-shaken China, and of her own birth in China, and the trip to Canada shortly thereafter. We, as readers, almost feel we are spying on this very personal exchange. Speaking through another character this way is a fictional technique. But here we are unable to lose hold of the thread of fact, the horror of the Holocaust, the brutality of the Japanese army in China, the fear of constantly fleeing from what the "J" on the family's passports will bring upon them. The historical facts of the loss of all property and rights in Vienna, the wave of Jewish immigrants to Shanghai, one of the few ports that would accept them, of the ghettos that were then built there, are mixed with small observations that make this a personal narrative, not a historical text. One such observation is the title metaphor, drawn from a song sung by British troops in Shanghai, in which "Ten green bottle sitting on a wall" fall to the ground one after the other. This is used by Nini to illustrate the continuing crises that she faces, picturing a bottle shattering every time she has to face another disappointment: her move from Vienna, the rough conditions in Shanghai, her mother's death, the assumed death of her husband's parents at Dachau, and finally the near death of her child, the author, from typhoid. The image invokes Kristallnacht in its brutality, but is also poetic in its quiet devastation. "How many more 'bottles' remain in my life?" asks Nini. It is a rare abstract image in a book based on the all-too-real. "Ten Green Bottles" is not quite a diary, but is much more than a memoir, and too polished for a monologue. It is the mother's words coming from the daughter's mouth, private words that even the daughter was not guaranteed to hear, much less the reader: "We have vowed to ourselves not to tell the children we may nurture one day, nor anyone in the outside world, what we have suffered." So what changed this promise? The human need for storytelling, for family history, or the larger need to let history record suffering so that it would not be repeated? Either way, the reader is treated to a tight, powerful and intimate view of one woman's strength to live through, and speak of, one of the most horrific periods in recent history. "Heather Campbell is a Toronto-based freelance writer."

A Mother's brave journey