Heirlooms by Rachel Hall
The baby carriage and
the layette of gowns and sweaters she’d assembled were taken away while she
convalesced. For this Sylvie is
grateful. The dogs are gone, too, and
though she doesn’t ask about them, for a long time she will expect their sharp
energetic barks, the frantic swinging of their tails as she moves about the
yard.
This collection of linked short stories won the GS Sharat
Chandra Prize for Short Fiction run by BkMk Press last year. I received a copy for entering the contest
and not winning, so there may be some sour grapes involved in my reading. Heirlooms
follows an extended family of Jewish refugees through their escape from Europe
in the 1930s and into the generations that succeed them in both America and
Israel.
I most liked the early stories that dealt with surviving and
escaping the rising tide of anti-Semitism in France. Hall captures the way that petty jealousies
and fears can make minor disputes life threatening under the right political
situations. These are the stories that
most made me think about America’s current treatment of refugees and how our
own pettiness is affecting people. There
is also a wonderful story at the end of the collection in which the adult granddaughter
of the survivors becomes entangled in the grief of a makeshift gang who mourn
the death of a member by building a tacky roadside memorial on her lawn.
The book is weakest in the way that linked short story
collections are often weak – stories that advance the larger narrative but don’t
work very well as stories on their own.
There are also moments when I am disappointed that Hall has cast her net
so widely: by following the characters for three generations she has diluted
the power of the early stories as much as she has extended it towards hope.
However, I enjoyed the collection for its high points, early
and late. Hall has tackled large ideas
and embedded them in the lives of real people, succeeding in getting us to
remember the past and think clearly about the present. I can stand losing to that.
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