Holding My Breath: A Novel
by Sidura Ludwig
THE NATIONAL POST
7 April 2007, review by Ruth Panofsky
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Debut explores primacy of family
There is much to admire in Sidura Ludwig's debut novel, Holding My Breath, a coming-of-age story set in the mid-20th century: its powerful evocation of setting, compelling cast of complex female characters and affirming celebration of Jewish family life.
Winnipeg's legendary North End -- the birthplace of many prominent Canadians, including entertainer Monty Hall, historian Norman Penner and novelist Adele Wiseman -- is the insular world of Beth's upbringing. Within the narrow boundaries of this predominantly Jewish enclave, Ludwig's narrator/protagonist, Beth Levy, grows up in a family dominated by women: her grandmother, her mother, Goldie, and aunts Carrie and Sarah. Beth's world consists largely of domestic spaces -- her grandmother's home, the small apartment where she is born and raised, the family home on McAdam Avenue, her aunt Carrie's flat and the interior of her father's shop -- which feel protective and later stifling as she develops from a contented, acquiescent girl into a mature, responsible young adult by the novel's close. That Beth's journey is an interior one, articulated through her private thoughts and secret aspirations, is reinforced by the interior landscape of the novel. Little of Winnipeg's physical geography, aside from fleeting references to wind and cold, intrude on Beth's inner world.
Beth's understanding of the world is shaped largely by the women in her family, whose strengths and weaknesses she intuits from an early age. Her grandmother, known as Baba, is the practical stalwart of the family, the mother of three girls and one boy who is killed in an accident just before he is to be sent into action during the Second World War. Beth's mother, Goldie, is the oldest of Baba's daughters and aspires to the role of housewife and mother to four children. When her dream is delayed (her wish to own a home of her own is not realized until late in her marriage) and her deepest desire is thwarted (she is unable to have more than one child), Goldie becomes despondent, angry and at times unstable. Goldie's sister Carrie bears the burden of a secret that regularly threatens her fragile equilibrium. The most repressed of the three sisters, she nonetheless shows tremendous strength in the face of personal pain. Sarah, the youngest daughter, who is born to Baba late in life, rejects her ageing mother, rebels against the constraints of her upbringing and seeks freedom as an actor and singer. When she abandons her husband and small daughter, Sarah experiences complete loss and causes irreparable pain. Beth's task is to measure the degree of influence each of these women may exact and decide the course of her own life.
The untimely death of Beth's uncle resonates throughout the novel to underscore the value of human life and the importance of family. Both Goldie and Carrie mourn their brother and keep his memory alive. Sarah, however, who was an infant at the time of his death, has no memory of him. This lack of memory prevents her from connecting deeply with either her mother or her sisters and, Ludwig suggests, accounts for Sarah's independent spirit and inability to form lasting relationships. The primacy of family, and especially marriage, is shown through Beth's own parents, who together overcome personal crises, economic difficulties and serious illness.
When Beth recognizes her parents' abiding and loving commitment to one another, she feels an adolescent discomfort, but she also accepts the importance of family. Ironically, it is that acceptance that facilitates her necessary growth away from her parents. By the end of the novel, she is on the cusp of adulthood, about to leave Winnipeg for university in Chicago. Beth's youth may account for the relative lack of depth that characterizes this first-person account. In fact, Beth Levy's distanced voice -- the first-person perspective is usually more penetrating than Beth's -- prevents the reader from fully knowing any of Ludwig's characters. While Beth's detachment might mask a repressed ambivalence toward familial bonds, it might also indicate a novice writer's struggle with narrative voice, the single but decisive feature that hinders a reader's full engagement with Ludwig's first fiction.