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The Other Sister
by Lola Lemire Tostevin
Toronto: Inanna Publications
& Education, Inc., 2008, ISBN 978-0-9808822-1-6, 241 pp., $22.95 paper.
New experiences will influence everyone's lives, but they can redefine the future for the fortunate. This is the case with the Toronto academic and author Lola Lemire Tostevin. Exposure to the English language in a Timmins, Ontario convent school began to turn the working-class Franco-Ontarian into a cosmopolitan writer. Feminism defined her early poetry and still influences her literary perspective. This means that her sympathetic imagination is refined by knowledge and conviction, a formula for substantial fiction.The Other Sister is a contemporary tale about Julia Brannon, an aged WASP ex-philosophy professor, who moves into Everholme, a Toronto senior citizens' residence. There, she meets Lena Kohn, a Jewish Hungarian who, like her, is a surviving twin sister. Ironically, this leads the protagonist to discover the distance between them; she lost "Sissa" in a personal tragedy, but Kohn's sister lost her life due to Dr. Mengele's infamous experiments on twins.
Two other characters link Julia and Lena, in their own special ways. Hungarian concert pianist Gizi Magris, a burn victim, is temporarily lodged at Everholme. Julia volunteers to help her until she discovers that the visitor hates Gypsies and Jews, including Lena, from "one of those camps, no doubt" (130). The senior's outrage at that attitude binds her closer to the survivor. The discovery that her other friend, retired mathematics professor Daniel Browne, is also Jewish leads her to examine her life in her casually anti-Semitic old milieu. This psychological journey furthers her understanding of Jewish-Gentile relations.
Tostevin reminds readers that although her novel "reflects elements of historical accuracy, resemblances to actual persons living or dead are coincidental" (231). This means that she seamlessly intertwines fact and fiction. Lena and her twin Leni are equally imaginary, but their Auschwitz tormentor, Dr. Josef Mengele, was all too real. Those who are not students of Canadian history may view Frederick Charles Blair as merely Julia's father, Harlan Crane's most prestigious legal client. The historically aware know Blair as the official who formulated Canada's anti-Jewish immigration policy in the late 1930s.
The same process may be applied to Toronto's geography. Locals may recognize "Kenilworth Crescent in the Beaches," but not "Wildwood Park" (146). No matter--the name evokes Julia's upper middle-class society.
Evenholme is a comfortable way station for characters who have been wounded by one historical trauma or another. Readers learn that lesson by observing Mr. Wilkes, a querulous World War I veteran, who asks his peers to relate their most profound experiences. Julia answers this intrusive question by citing the use of anaesthetics. He pounces, dismissing her as a privileged woman who "would not have had to worry about anything as inconsequential as defending her country because she had more important developments to worry about . . ." (17). The veteran displays a masculine myopia; even wealthy women were forced to cope with wartime casualties. Brannon's mother had to care for a husband who returned from the Great War, an ulcerated amputee. She had to witness his nightmares and conceal his drinking bouts. Julia had to deal with "Sissa" and her niece Rachel after her twin seamen nephews, William and Thomas, were lost in the sinking of the HMCS Athabaskan. She is merely too dignified to play "I'll show you my scars if you'll show me yours" with Wilkes. Not surprisingly, he confronts Lena, who trumps his World War I terrors with World War II horrors.
Historical and contemporary settings are developed with telling details and socially aware portraiture. References to a defunct amusement park and Taddle Creek, now an underground stream, recall a vanished Toronto. When "Sissa" informs a family gathering that "knowledge is not always of great service to men of knowledge" (148), she simultaneously sideswipes Thirties bigotry and sexism. The presence of laptop computers suggests a decade, but a "9/11" reference establishes the year. Thea, a post-punk academic, outlines artistic progress by pointing out that the comic books she writes about in her cultural studies course are really adult "graphic novels," not the old-time "funny papers."
The plot is divided into multiple past tracks and a present one. The latter unfolds as the former progresses, but the past influences the present. As Julia understands Lena's tragedy, she eventually senses its emotional implications. The plot deals with the effects of World War I and the Holocaust, through the perspective of a sheltered Toronto seniors' residence. This view diffuses the action in a manner that discourages impatient readers. Patient ones are rewarded with shock and transformation.
Ronald Charles Epstein saw Lola Lemire Tostevin at a Richmond Hill (Ontario) library poetry reading.
Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.