In the nightmare world of the Warsaw Ghetto there was a half-starved orphan so in love with literature that when the German occupiers banned the act of reading, she became a courier in a clandestine network calling itself a walking library. Risking her life, Renata delivered books to readers. Sometimes she received a tip in the form of a piece of bread, but her payment was that she had access to the books. Literature, always loved, became her weapon against despair. In the ghetto, eerily, Renata read Franz Werfel’s Forty Days of Musa Dagh, his account of the Armenian genocide. Crouched in a corner of the room she shared with a myriad of relatives, Renata began to read Emile Zola’s Nana; the story of a French prostitute who is the ruin of every man who pursues her. Her older brother pulled the novel out of her hands. “You’re too young to read that. You can read it when you’re eighteen.” Matter-of-factly the hollow-eyed youngster replied, “I won’t live to be eighteen.”
Surprising herself, the Jewish girl with the name meaning ‘reborn,” survived. In time she married, and then became a mother. Mine. When I was a little girl, my mother encouraged and guided my reading, gladly feeding my appetite for books. It was with great solemnity that one frosty afternoon after school, my mother presented me with Anne of Green Gables. “When I was your age, I read this book in translation. This book introduced me to Canada. My vision of Canada then was of a faraway, peaceful land filled with snow. I could never have dreamed that one day my very own daughter would be Canadian-born and I would be giving her this book in the original English.” The entire Anne series had been on my mother’s walking library list. Anne of Green Gables was her gift to both of us.
My brother’s eldest daughter surmounted a learning disability, and became a passionate reader. She would prop up her novels at the lunch table, read by flashlight in bed, hide with her books in corners of a large family home, and evade visitors in order to escape into the pages of her latest literary voyage.
The evening after my mother turned eighty, we attended my (now) eighteen-year-old niece’s high school commencement. Sitting in a gymnasium, witnessing the celebration of carefree teenagers in the serene land of Anne-with-an-E, tears streamed down the cheeks of my niece’s “Nana.”
Familiar with the interior of my mother’s apartment, the concierge of the building in which she lived dubbed her “The Lady Who Loves Books.” The cancer my mother lived with slowed her down, so she didn’t get to the libraries as often as she would have liked. When I moved into my mother’s neighbourhood in order to be quickly accessible to her, and for her, I became my mother’s walking library.
Mum would e-mail to me lists of books she wanted to read, I would fill the orders at our neighbourhood library and deliver them to her apartment. No matter how treacherous the weather, I always delivered.
My mother clung tenaciously to life because she didn’t want to leave me, but cancer finally killed her. I have her glass-encased bookcase now, which holds a blend of her personal library, and mine. Zola’s Nana leans against Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward. The Lady Who Loved Books never read it, to the end.
About the author
S. Nadja Zajdman is a Canadian author. In 2022 she published the story collection The Memory Keeper (Bridgehouse Publishing, Manchester) as well as the memoir I Want You To Be Free (Hobart Books, Oxford) In 2023 Zajdman published a second memoir, Daddy's Remains (MacKenzie Publishing, Nova Scotia, Canada)
Did you enjoy the story? Would you like to shout us a coffee? Half of what you pay goes to the writers and half towards supporting the project (web site maintenance, preparing the next Best of book etc.)
No comments:
Post a Comment