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| ISBN-13: | 9781101202975 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2001 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 351,544 |
| File size: | 475 KB |
About the Author
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Chapter 1
I smoked my first cigarette when I was six years old. I found it on the kitchen windowsill, though the railway platform proved more reliable. The butts I gathered on that platform made terrible, gritty cigarettes, hardly worth re-rolling, yet to my mind, they're all mixed up with where I smoked them, by the tracks. I loved the trains, window after window of Budapesti smokers who would carry cigarettes to theaters, lectures, and cafés. I'd do those things too. But later there would also be smokes passed, like gifts, between strangers in the dark.
Now where the hell can I get a cigarette? Everyone in Israel is a smoker, but nobody gets something for nothing, and what do I have to trade? Not that my head's the clearest. We're just off the boat, Louisa and I, and we expected my cousin, Bela, to meet us at the dock, but he wasn't there. We went through customs, and there were so many of us piling in at once that we were backed up for hours. By the time they let us go, it was dark. Rain fell by the fistful. No Bela.
So we were forced onto a government truck parked by the gate, a flatbed full of Poles. Some young clods in wet leather jackets unfastened the tarp and hoisted us on board, and those Poles reluctantly made room between their trunks and carpetbags and feather mattresses. The rain slapped on the tarp and cut through a stream of aromatic Yiddish. It was hard to tell where the luggage ended and the humanity began. There is a kind of Jew who looks deep fried, a chinless sloucher. Here was a happy family of them.
Louisa whispered, "Ich verstehe kein Wort."
The Poles fell silent. A woman to my right asked, in Yiddish, "What is she?"
"My daughter-in-law," I said.
She asked, "What is she doing here?"
"The same as me."
"She's not the same as you."
It was no use saying no, here in the truck skidding through mud that would take us to a transient camp where we would share close quarters. Could I begrudge them curiosity?
Ah, the trouble was, I could. I had no use for these people. I had no use for this country. If Bela had met us at the dock, I would have understood why I was here.
The easy answer was: where else did I have to go? I'd lost my parents and my husband and my son. I had only Louisa. I owe her my life. It was Louisa who had kept me hidden during the German occupation. This was five years ago, in Budapest. Louisa stayed through a siege under a rain of bombs and steady gunfire, and she kept me in the cellar of her family house through the winter, in constant danger of discovery and death. The latticed vent under the piano of her music room was our lone gateway, and through it she passed water, rolls, canned meat, and cigarettes. Often, she would sing a composition by my son.
What is lost, what is lost
We can not have back again.
It is like a breath we've taken.
We can not breathe it again.
It is like good bread we've eaten.
We can not eat it again.
It is like a heart we've broken
Or our own heart, lost in vain.
Some days, I could hear nothing but a constant roar in my ears. It must have been the sound of my own blood which, my cousin Adele the nurse once told me, renews itself once every three weeks. In that case, in that cellar my blood was renewed four times. I don't doubt it made a noise.
After the war I didn't seek out Louisa, but she found me. I was at the border station on my way to Italy, and she grabbed hold of me and cried out, "Mutti, I'm going with you!"
She wore a rabbit-fur coat and she gripped me so hard that I could feel through the fluff straight to the skin. "What do you want from me?" I'd demanded then. "You've done enough. Let go."
But she didn't let go, even as the train pulled from the station, and though she didn't have the proper papers, somehow we were rolling through the mountains of Slovenia and then to Trieste, where after some time we secured passage on a boat bound for Haifa to the Holy Land, and during our months on the road, not once did she let go.
Why did she cling to me? She said she loved me. "Dear," I said, "that's not a reason."
"You're all alone."
"I'm going to my cousin."
"I want to be where you are."
"And what if they don't want you?"
In fact, they all knew: Poles, Slovaks, Romanians, Greeks, even the British at Cyprus. Everything about Louisa told them she was German. They'd start with questions, and I'd answer, "I owe her my life."
On the boat, she sought out a rabbi. It is Louisa's way to look for things without hesitation or embarrassment. She wanted to convert before we reached the Holy Land, and she cornered anyone who looked like he might do. There were few contenders. The emigrants were young and sullen, and none of the men had beards. Sometimes, Louisa would catch a fellow with a hat on, who was staring at the sea with an expression that she chose to read as prayerful, and she would ask him to baptize her and make her a Jew.
One fierce girl gripped my arm and asked, "Does she know where the boat's going?"
I couldn't keep pace with her Yiddish, and again I only said, "I owe her my life."
"You owe her something? Work it out with God. Don't bring us such a burden. Don't bring it to Israel. You know what she is?"
She pressed close, chin all but indenting mine, and her hot breath steamed all over my face so that I had to ask, mildly, "Do you have a cigarette?"
"She's their daughter," the woman said. "Even here we can't escape them."
So much for Yiddish. To me, it's greasy black hats, the smell of fish, wet eiderdown, that truck. My own emerges a resentful mouthful at a time. I prefer German. In Budapest, our set spoke German, and it was in German that I wrote my letters to my cousin Bela. The telegram I sent Bela from Trieste was in German, and in German I received his answer. Das gibt's doch nicht! Wann? Wo?
That answer met my expectations-joyous, tender, and inquisitive. It was printed in blue type so faint it might have floated, and only after I'd replied with the details of our arrival did I notice the unfamiliar Haifa address on the bottom of the page. So had Bela left Kibbutz Tilulit? That seemed impossible.
Bela had founded Tilulit. I imagine it the way it was in a photograph he sent me in '25, a photograph I lost: himself and two comrades in front of the kibbutz chicken coop. Dori sat on a spool of wire, legs stuffed into shorts, elbows on thighs, blond hair blown back. Bela and Nathan knelt on either side. They were substantial people, muscular and happy. They had just finished building the coop that day. Sunlight or overexposure filled their hair and glanced off bare knees into the camera. Bela would be grizzled now, and his hair would have gone gray, but he would whip open the tarp over the truck full of Poles with that same happy, frank expression, as though it were the gate of a chicken coop he'd built with his own hands.
If I had sent the date of our arrival to the wrong address, it stood to reason that Bela would not have received it in time to meet our boat. It would be futile to try to contact him that night, but until I saw him, everything around me would feel impermanent, the camp, mud underfoot, Poles, Yiddish. Also Louisa. She jumped off the truck, pulling both myself and our luggage with her.
"Mutti," she said, "we must thank God we have arrived." She bowed her head.
"We'll be trampled," I said to Louisa, for by now there was a push for bedding and ration-books. Such were our numbers that the camp administrators made no attempt to keep records, but they sprinkled us with disinfectant powder and handed out papers no one had the equilibrium to read. What with the rain, the ink of the documents was running.
No one paid attention to bed assignments, and by the time we reached our block, Louisa and I had to make do with a single cot under a window that didn't quite close. Around us, the Poles emptied carpetbags and fought over the space around the fizzling electric heater. The barracks were a shell. When the British left Palestine in '48, they'd stripped them down to a few walls of corrugated tin that more or less held up a roof. On that roof, rain slapped and the light hummed like a mosquito, and between those high and low notes ran the Yiddish, a tongue no cultured person speaks. The Poles were all old friends. They had been liberated by the same battalion, and at the same American DP camp in Belsen they had attended the same Labor-Zionist meetings and would probably settle into the same apartment block in Tel Aviv and turn it into Warsaw.
Louisa made up our bed matter-of-factly, as though all of this were just as she'd imagined. She opened our little suitcase and pulled out our dressing gowns, modestly climbing into her own under the sheet, and kissing me before laying her head down and at once falling asleep. She curled there, with the bedding tucked around her and a crescent of disinfectant powder clinging to her cheek. Her hair fanned her arm, and the softness of that arm, the fairness of that hair, stirred as she breathed. Her breathing put me in mind of her singing voice, which is moving and a little uncanny and implies an intelligence you can't see in her face. I watched her for a while, and then I heard a voice close to my ear.
"Csodálatos! Excellent human material."
Hungarian. I turned, and inches away on a neighboring cot sat a Pole in a leather jacket. He addressed me, but his eyes were on Louisa.
"They'll never let her stay in Israel. Who knows how she got this far." He introduced himself. "Yossel Berkowitz. A man of business."
"You're not Hungarian," I said. "How do you-"
"What don't I know, Nagymama? There are businessmen in Hungary, in Italy, in Greece, in all the mighty nations. Now Hebrew, that's another matter. All Zionists must learn Hebrew."
I took him in: dull eyes under a fur cap, broken nose, stained teeth. I said, "You don't look like a Zionist."
Amused, he said, "Nagymama, do you look like a Zionist? We're all Zionists now."
I had to laugh, in spite of the foul air, my lack of sleep, perhaps even because of them; they're both narcotic. Maybe hearing my mother-tongue disarmed me, because for the first time in who knows how long, I put more than four words together. "In this room, then, I'd say there are more Zionists than there were in all of Hungary before the war, and what a likely bunch of recruits, God help us. Do you include my daughter-in-law?"
"Give me your daughter-in-law," he said.
I didn't answer. I only stared.
"You want to be rid of her. Of course you do. How can she sleep?"
Then I could only say, "I owe her my life."
Berkowitz laughed or coughed. A light blazed, and with a brief, dismissive gesture, he placed a burning cigarette in my hand. "You break my heart with your gratitude. So she saved your life. She gave you yours, and you give me hers. A fair exchange."
I inhaled. It was my first smoke in a week, and confusion peeled away, allowing me a clarity impossible without a cigarette. My circumstances arranged themselves. I was in a cold room with a lot of strangers. Why should it concern me? In the morning I would find Bela at the new address he'd sent me. One night. I had passed worse nights, and with Louisa. I touched the place in my stocking where I had put Bela's telegram, and a shot went through my bones. It was gone.
Berkowitz broke through the silence. "There's something you're not telling."
Forcing some equilibrium, I managed to ask him, "Why do you want Louisa?"
He smiled and replied, "Do you realize how much people would pay to fuck a German?"
—Reprinted from Louisa by Simone Zelitch by permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright (c) 2000 by Simone Zelitch. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
What People are Saying About This
Remember the genius with which Jane Smiley retold the story of King Lear and his daughters? With the same such genius, Simone Zelitch transforms the biblical story of Naomi and Ruth. What a fine book this is, and utterly compelling.
A remarkable book...handled with unforced authority from first to final line.
— (Nicholas Delbanco, author of The Lost Suitcase)
I admire Simone Zelitch's ability to capture the essence of life in pre- and mid-Holocaust Europe. The parallel to the Book of Ruth lends new insight to both stories.
— Pearl Abraham (author of The Romance Reader)
“Talk about finding the silver lining. Here’s a novel that spans nearly 50 years of Hungarian Jewish history—from the empire of Franz Josef through World War II and the Holocaust to the early days of the state of Israel—and transforms struggle and tragedy into an enthralling tale…while often poignant, the storytelling avoids melodrama, self-righteousness and graphic horror—all the pitfalls of Holocaust fiction. Instead, suspense, surprising revelations and dry humor enliven the mix…Of all the novel’s successes, the portrait of Louisa steals the show. Deftly, the author conveys the eerie tenacity and resourcefulness that lie behind her deceptively timid manner…a stunningly good work: highly imaginative, impressively constructed, erudite yet genuinely moving.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Zelitch’s talent shines in this well-paced epic novel, and the combination of Nora’s frank, realistic voice with romantic imagery is striking and beautiful.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Zelitch’s narrative teases with emotional puzzles and surprises with unexpected developments. She shows virtuosic skill with background and atmosphere…While she demonstrates a sure grasp of history, Zelitch here transcends historical events with a provocative depiction of the enduring mysteries of human relationships.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Remember the genius with which Jane Smiley retold the story of King Lear and his daughters on a thousand acres of Iowa farmland? It is with the same such genius that Simone Zelitch transforms the Biblical story of the widow Naomi and her daughter-in-law Ruth. Louisa left me stuttering with admiration. What a fine book it is, and utterly compelling.”—Bob Shacochis
“Masterful.”—The Baltimore Sun
“Zelitch raises sharp questions about the nature of love and loyalty, never succumbing to easy answers. By the end of Louisa, everyone has changed in ways they could not have envisioned.”—The Seattle Times
“Haunting…a provocative depiction of the enduring mysteries of human relationships.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Simone Zelitch’s ability to capture the essence of life in pre- and mid-Holocaust Europe…lends new insight to both stories.”—Pearl Abraham
“Superb…a mature and absorbing story of sacrifice, illusion, and resignation, and an important contribution to the literature of Holocaust and Exodus.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A grand, brave, open-hearted novel…honest, intelligent, and highly entertaining.”—The Boston Globe
Reading Group Guide
In the bible, Ruth the Moabite leaves her native land to follow her Israelite mother-in-law Naomi and take on her people and her God. In Louisa, Nora Csongradi, a perpetually cranky, chain-smoking Holocaust survivor arrives in Israel in 1949 with her German daughter-in-law, Louisa. Nora is certain that she will be welcomed by her cousin Bela, a Zionist pioneer whom she has loved since childhood, but Bela fails to appear and the women enter an absorption camp for new immigrants to face an uncertain future. Nora's search for Bela proves futile. His kibbutz does not exist on any map, and it is clear that the Palestine he had described in letters over the years has transformed into a place she cannot recognize, and where she does not feel welcome. As weeks pass, Nora is forced to take stock of their relationship and of the world she left behind in Hungary: the loss of her family, her failed marriage to a Communist, and the death of her only son.
As memory leads back to memory, it becomes clear that the emotions that bind Louisa and Nora are complex, and that it is often difficult in the course of living one's life to know what acts to call heroic and who to blame. Nora owes her life to Louisa, who kept Nora in hiding in her family's cellar during the war. Now Louisa, the German, clings to Nora and wants to take on her people and her God. In the end, it is Louisa, rather than Nora, who finds Bela. She appears, like the biblical Ruth, as her mother-in-law's proxy, working in the orange grove where Bela is the foreman and declaring her need with a directness and a vulnerability that Nora herself could never match.
Although the novel is told from Nora's point of view, Louisa herself is the classic heroine who will risk all for someone she loves. Yet, as Nora's own life suggests, not everyone wants or can offer that kind of love. Stranded in a new country that asks them to look to the future, both women must face the past and the responsibility each bears for what she has lost. Nora knows how to survive, but Louisa must teach her how to forgive.
DISCUSSIONQUES: Q>Is Louisa a love story? If so, whose love story?
Q>Louisa is narrated by Nora, who has no trouble revealing the interior lives of other characters, such as Gabor and Bela. How does Nora get access to this information? As she tells their stories as well as her own, are there certain aspects of their lives that she doesn't understand, or will not admit?
Q>In the camp for new arrivals, several of the Israelis express their disgust for the Holocaust survivors. What might be some of the sources of this attitude? To what extent is it consistent with other aspects of Israeli society as depicted in the novel?
Q>Why does Louisa follow Nora? At the novel's outset, she answers the question by simply saying that she loves her, an answer Nora finds unsatisfactory. What does this exchange tell us about Nora and Louisa? By novel's end, have Nora's judgments about Louisa become more complicated?
Q>Rabbi Needleman tells Louisa that wanting to help her mother-in-law is not a reason to convert to Judaism, and he encourages her to explore her life and see what has drawn her to Jews and ultimately to Israel. What do we discover about Louisa's motives for conversion? How does she understand Judaism? By the novel's end, has her understanding changed, and do her reasons ultimately fit the rabbi's criteria?
Q>Before the war, Bela asks Nora, time and time again, to immigrate to Palestine, but Nora consistently refuses to go despite her knowledge that anti-Semitism exists in Hungary. Given these circumstances, why does she remain in Budapest during the 1930s? Which of Nora's reasons seem unique to her own set of circumstances, and which seem true of other European Jews, such as Bela's sister and mother, who do not leave?
Q>When Nora first hears Louisa sing Gabor's composition, which includes words she had written to Bela, she feels a shock of recognition. She says, "I could not tell where those words ended and her voice began." Do Nora and Louisa have anything in common? What are the parallels and distinctions between Nora's feeling for Bela, and Louisa's for Gabor?
Q>Towards the novel's end, Louisa tells Bela her version of the story we have heard from Nora. In Louisa's version, she did not save Nora's life; in fact, Nora saved hers. Does this declaration have any legitimacy? How does Louisa's perception of events differ from Nora's?
Q?Louisa is, in some ways, a multi-lingual novel: Nora writes to her cousin and speaks to Louisa in German, converses with her compatriots in Hungarian, hears Janos address occupying Soviet soldiers in Russian, and, after her emigration to Israel, is faced with "incomprehensible" Hebrew. What associations do these different languages have for Nora, for Bela, and for other characters in the novel?
Q>Midway through the novel, Rabbi Needleman reviews the Book of Ruth, a story with strong parallels to Louisa's. How does familiarity with the biblical Ruth and Naomi change the way you read the story of Louisa and Nora? In what ways do the stories diverge? How does taking the point of view of Nora/Naomi change the tone and the content of the narrative?
Q>Consider the ambitions of Zionism as articulated by Bela and as put into practice by the original settlers of Kibbutz Tilulit. Why did these European Jews want to live in Palestine, and what sort of country did they hope to build there? To what extent, from Nora's perspective, are they successful? How does Bela's perspective on Zionism change in the course of the novel, and why does he ultimately choose to leave the kibbutz?
Q>In the novel's final line, Nora remembers Louisa insisting that Nora would eventually go to Palestine because "'...it's the Holy Land.'" She also recalls telling Louisa that there is no such place. Yet Nora leaves Janos to rebuild her life in the new state of Israel. How realistic are her expectations of that country, and of her cousin? Given that Bela marries Louisa, might Nora have been better off staying with Janos in Hungary? Taken from Discussion Questions
RGGRESOURCES: Discussion questions provided courtesy of G.P. Putnam
AUTHORBIO: Simone Zelitch was born in Philadelphia, where she now lives. She attended Wesleyan University, where she wrote an early draft of her first book, The Confession of Jack Straw, a novel that combines original folk-tales with the story of a medieval peasant revolt. The novel won a Hopwood Award. After receiving her MFA at University of Michigan, she taught Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University. In the early 1990s, Zelitch joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Hungary where she trained former teachers of Russian to teach English. The toughness and indelible sense of humor of these students helped shape the voice and attitude of the Hungarian characters in Louisa.
AUTHCOMMENTS: Someone once asked Chekhov how he wrote. Chekhov replied by picking up an ashtray and saying, "Tomorrow, I will write a story called The Ashtray." Of course it should be that easy. We find stories everywhere, and we simply need the courage to tell them. I began Louisa in just that spirit. After completing two dense, ambitious, novels, I longed for a way to shrug off all pretensions and simply write. Why couldn't I just start something simple, something called, say, The Ashtray? I typed that title on top of the first page, and then began: "I started smoking when I was six years old..."
Who started smoking? A woman who was not so young, not terribly attractive and--this came to me slowly--in a perpetual foul temper. Why was she in a foul temper? Because she couldn't get any cigarettes. Why couldn't she get any cigarettes? Because, I thought, she is dependent on someone, and can not bring herself to ask for a favor. So began a stream of emotionally charged questions, and I realized that I had entered deep waters. It would take a long time to do justice to this story about a prickly, strong-willed woman who is in somebody else's power. She was a survivor, a--it came to me--Holocaust survivor named Nora who arrived in Israel after the war with her German daughter-in-law, Louisa.
According to the Bible, another survivor once appeared in Israel with her daughter-in-law. The survivor's name was Naomi, and the daughter-in-law was Ruth, a non-Jew who clung to Naomi and took on her people and her God. I had received at least a skeletal religious education, and knew the story of Ruth and Naomi well enough to be aware that Ruth was a model of selfless devotion. However, as I re-read the story, I found myself struck by Naomi's consistent bitterness, the way she never expresses affection, or even gratitude, towards Ruth. Is it possible that not everyone wants to be loved as much as Ruth loved Naomi? In my novel, Louisa saves Nora's life by hiding her in her family cellar. Now, Louisa refuses to leave Nora. Can any such relationship be simple?
Once I began to do some research, matters became even more complicated. After all, in choosing Nora, I had taken on two impossible subjects, the Holocaust and Zionism. One of the most difficult parts of writing historically based fiction is to know when to stop doing research. At some point, I would have to reign myself in and focus on the story at hand. Unfortunately, given the material, I could take Nora's story in so many directions that the most likely final outcome would be complete paralysis. I managed to figure out that Nora is Hungarian and that she is in Israel searching to search for a Kibbutznik cousin. However, those two facts alone could have kept me in the library for the rest of my life.
Then I got lucky: I joined the Peace Corps and they sent me to Hungary. There, I taught for two years in Veszprem, a town just west of Budapest, and I went through a period when I didn't read or write a word. My full-time job was trying to make sense of where I'd landed. Veszprem has a famous zoo, a castle, a scenic overlook, an enormous Jewish cemetery, and no live Jews.
I remember the first time I looked through the gate of that cemetery and tried to read the Hebrew inscription through a tangle of weeds. Once, I returned from a trip to find that the undergrowth had been cleared by a volunteer troop of youths from Israel. The stones looked less forlorn, but I couldn't shake the sense that there was something dishonest about weeding that cemetery. It seemed to deny a basic truth: once there were Jews in Veszprem; now there were none. As I traveled east, I made a point of searching for abandoned synagogues. They weren't hard to find. Some of them were shells, filled with old tires, car parts, and wildflowers. Some of them had been cleaned up turned into something else altogether, such as the Great Synagogue of Kecskemet, which is now a Technical Museum and Dance Club. I walked around that museum for a few minutes, searching for some sign of what it had been. Then, without warning, I had to rush outside and cross to the park across the road, where I sat on the grass and cried. Somehow, I had never felt so Jewish as I did in Hungary. It made me wonder how we define identity. Can we only know who we are when we know what we've lost?
The years in Europe allowed for a few trips to Israel, where I did some research at the Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem, and explored the Galilee where Nora's cousin founded a kibbutz. I will admit to a long-time fascination with Kibbutzim and their founders. Even as I developed a critical ambivalence towards Israeli policy, I still loved those early pioneers. The first Jews who left Europe to make a home in Palestine believed that as they transformed the land, they would transform themselves. The Israel I found was still a land shaped by that spirit, what might be called "heroic optimism." Logically, when I came to that country, I should have felt what all Jews are told they ought to feel in Israel: proud, secure, and completely at home. Yet somehow I didn't. It might have been those years in Hungary, but the thought of transformation set my teeth on edge.
At one point, I came across a deserted Arab quarter where an empty mosque had been turned into an artist's studio. When I asked my Israeli companion how he felt about the way the building had been used, he shrugged. "It was a war. They were here. Now they're gone." I told him about the synagogue in Kecskemet and he nodded. "Same thing. There was a war and now they're gone." I felt a little sick. Admittedly, the analogy had been my own, but I'd never expected him to agree. Once he had, I almost wanted to start an argument, to insist that there was no equivalence between expulsion and extermination. Still, was that the question at hand? I had asked about some empty buildings. What did I want the Israelis and the Hungarians to do with their mosques and their synagogues? Turn them into museums of displaced persons? Re-populate their countries with the people they had dispossessed and shepherd them inside?
I imagined Nora and the other survivors arriving in Israel in 1949. Some of those newcomers moved into emptied Arab villages. How did they fit into this society that did not believe in looking back? Nora, in any event, was neither heroic nor optimistic. In fact, her refusal to let go of the past, and to become a new woman, is an essential part of her character. Would she feel at home in Israel? Hardly. Yet she had no other home. And with her was her German daughter in law, Louisa, who, like the Biblical Ruth, was as flexible as mercury, a genius at transformation, in some ways the perfect Israeli. Nora responds with a cranky and ironic distance that rises like a wall of barbed wire. What does she protect behind that wall? The past, and its secrets.
Above all else, Nora was what drove the novel on. I let her voice shape the book's structure, as memory gives way to memory, and she tries to reconcile what she has lost with where she has landed, in a country she can not understand with a girl who will not let go. It was a matter of telling the story on her terms. It was also a matter of trying my first cigarette at the age of thirty. It was an unfiltered Chesterfield, and it smelled like a Fig Newton, and gave me a head rush that took me by surprise. For just one moment, I held the world at arm's length, and everything made sense. Then, just as suddenly, it didn't. No wonder Nora wanted another cigarette.
Ultimately, it is not such an easy thing to write about an ashtray. When you have a certain kind of imagination, every object turns into a metaphor, and those metaphors have their own momentum. In the years it took me to figure out the best way to tell Nora's story, I have always returned to the woman who put between herself and her circumstances a little smoke.