Controversy continues to surround the issue of truth-in-memoir. These days, who dares to tell their own story and call it fact? And how can readers ever expect that memory and the passage of time will not affect the narrative? In his brilliant essay on the subject published in The Walrus in 2007, Joe Kertes quotes William Zinsser: “Memoir writers must manufacture a text, imposing narrative order on a jumble of half-remembered events. With that feat of manipulation they arrive at a truth that is theirs alone, not quite like that of anybody else who was present at the same events.” I suspect Edeet Ravel would agree.
In the Author's Note that opens The Last Rain, Ravel refers to Carl Sandburg's analogy of our collective past as “the labyrinth of sliding doors.” “The only way I can think of to explore that labyrinth,” she says, “… is through fiction.”
One might think that choosing to write her childhood experience as a novel would give Ravel the freedom to embroider, to tell the tale of a kibbutz in Israel's northern Galilee with more pure storytelling. Instead she has chosen an unexpected road to fictional memoir: She combines short narrative sections with documentary fragments. While depending on her own childhood memories and emotional responses, she also includes scenes from a play, daily schedules, diary entries, a long section of footnotes and more. We come to see the founding and the day-to-day life of the kibbutz from a variety of angles, all supporting the central experience of six-year-old Dori.
The sections written from Dori's viewpoint are absolutely magical, reminding us of what it was like to experience the small dramatic tragedies and the glorious joys of childhood . Unlike the extreme precocity of some fictional children, Dori's voice and experience are utterly realistic. The art of this novel comes from the complex relationship between Dori's reflections and documentary snippets – newspaper articles, minutes from kibbutz meetings, journals – that mirror her concerns. We can see how she mimics the conflicted reactions of the adults in her responses to military dangers, sexual relationships, religious orthodoxy, Arab neighbours and the all-important concept of “sharing.”'
One of the most fascinating elements of kibbutz life is the controversial separation of parents and children, and Dori's experience in the Children's House is vibrantly real. That Dori is Edeet Ravel is made clear by the inclusion of many charming photos of the author, her parents and other kibbutz children. By including so many forms of writing, so many ways of reflecting on kibbutz life and Israel of the 1950s, the reader may be getting a more complete view of that time and place.
I say it may be a more complete picture, because I'm not quite sure. I am a fan of Ravel's usual writing style; I love the rhythm of her sentences, the unusual scan of her lines, the peaks and valleys of her characters' thought patterns and dialogue. In her other novels she's a grand storyteller, unravelling a good tale filled with surprises and satisfactions. I miss all that in The Last Rain, where there is no sustained narrative. It sometimes feels like we're looking at an intriguing scrapbook, but no one is beside us on the couch to guide us through the images, to tie together the arc of the story.
If The Last Rain had been fully fiction we'd have the narrative and characters more fully-formed and engaging; if it had been memoir we might have learned more about the decisions made by the intriguing Naftali and Varda (her fictional mother and father, based on her own pioneering parents). We would have discovered the whole history of Eldar/Sasa and how the parenting concepts of the kibbutz, the lessons of sharing and the roots laid in the land of Israel influenced and carved the imagination of a writer. As it is, The Last Rain defies classification and gives us an unusual reading experience, an intriguing portrait of a kibbutz, and the lovely voice of Dori.
Cynthia Good is director of the Creative Book Publishing Program at Humber College in Toronto and leads classes and book clubs in contemporary Jewish fiction.
