Holding My Breath: A Novel
by Sidura Ludwig
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
3 March 2007, review by Ami Sands Brodoff
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Waiting to Exhale
As an aspiring writer, I once heard novelist Cynthia Ozick in heated debate with another Jewish author. In the Q&A, Ozick joked that what others call an argument, she considers a discussion. Such "discussions" flare up in the Levy household, the family at the centre of Holding My Breath, the promising debut by Sidura Ludwig.
Told in the dreamy voice of Beth as she comes of age in the Jewish community in Winnipeg following the Second World War, the story explores the taut pull between traditional family ties and the quest for individual fulfilment. This is an age-old conflict, but Ludwig makes it fresh despite hewing to conventional style and structure. But the key issue of anti-Semitism, and the heroine's own complex feelings about her Jewish identity, are given short shrift.
The baby in a household of two generations of feisty Jewish women and a gentle, placid father, Beth longs to find her own place in the world. She is shaped by her mother, Goldie, and her aunts, Sarah and Carrie, as well as several male ghosts.
Goldie is grounded, having relinquished girlish fancies with Beth's birth. Sleepless and beside herself with her newborn's colic, she is chided by her own mother in Yiddish: "You expect too much.... He is a good husband and you have a beautiful baby. That's it." Though Goldie loves her daughter, she often puts the kibosh on Beth's dreams.
Aunt Sarah is the beauty, wild and rebellious. Sadly, marriage diminishes her, as it does most of the women in Holding My Breath. A bombshell with a throaty laugh who longs to be a chanteuse, she shrinks into a bookkeeper who snorts instead of chuckling and weeps with "no sobs, no sounds, just tears."
Carrie, a dressmaker, is closest to her young niece and the most intriguing of the female characters. With her boxy build and mousy hair, she is set free by her lack of feminine charms simply to be who she is. Though she suffers, she makes her own choices. To Ludwig's credit, these sharply delineated women never simplify into types.
Although cosseted by the comforting, claustrophobic world of women, Beth is inspired by absent men. She is named for her Zaida Binyamin, and idolizes her lost Uncle Phil. A war hero killed in a plane crash, Phil comes back to life through family lore. It is through Aunt Carrie that Beth discovers Phil's astronomy journal, which sparks her fascination with space. "Thus began my obsession with... my uncle's notes and musings before he went to war." The most compelling element of this novel is how one's identity is shaped through inner gifts and outside influences. Beth traces Phil's drawings and hangs them on her wall; she pretends sparkling stones are dust particles from space and arranges them like her uncle's constellation maps. With her feet on the ground, she reaches for the stars.
Ludwig's setting, the North End of Winnipeg, is richly drawn without intruding on the calm, quiet story. Compelling historical events -- the aftermath of the war, the Russian launch of Sputnik and the assassination of Martin Luther King -- are kept at bay, underlining the insularity of the Levys' lives.
By the time Beth is in college, she longs to achieve escape velocity. Her greatest fear is being earthbound and corseted -- literally and spiritually -- inside a Good Housekeeping marriage and one of the girdle/bra contraptions her mother favours. She struggles to avoid the polarized choices open to her: wife and mother, or astronomer. Few women in her milieu bridge domestic and professional worlds.
Despite insistence on finding herself, Beth denies a core aspect of her identity. As the only Jew on her college baseball team, she insists her T-shirt bear only the name Beth, not Levy. The painful issue of anti-Semitism, and the even more troubling problem of hiding one's Judaism out of fear or shame, surely deserved more time and space. Ludwig takes on the ambitious task of spanning three decades, yet this remains on the periphery. Why?
Holding My Breath is a deft, albeit safe, debut. Ludwig has the gifts to launch beyond the predictable. When she dares to exhale, she may find her writing takes a leap.