Sample
pages from EDGES
by Leora Skolkin-Smith
 EDGES
by Leora Skolkin-Smith, Glad Day Books
Published: June, 2005
ISBN 1-930180-14-4
Contact: skolkin@nyc.rr.com
Edges
was selected by Grace Paley for Glad Day Books, a new publishing
house founded by Ms. Paley and Robert Nichols. This is Leora Skolkin-Smith's
first novel. A Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient of a P.E.N.
American Center grant, she has been published in Persea: An
International Review an anthology published by Persea Books,
The Sarah Lawrence Review, and has a short piece forthcoming
in Fiction Magazine. Ms. Skolkin-Smith has received grants
from The New York State Council on the Arts, The Department of
Cultural affairs, The Millay Colony for the Arts, The Vermont
Studio Center, and Art-Without-Walls. She was awarded a Teaching
Fellowship for graduate work at Sarah Lawrence College where she
holds a BA and MFA in writing.
Edges
is set in a pre-1967 Israel, during the Cold War. Liana Bialik
is fourteen years old when the suicide of her American father
forces her family to return to her mother's native Jerusalem.
A chance meeting with a runaway American diplomat's son in the
forest draws Liana into an odyssey of borders, loss, and love.
After witnessing the accidental death of a young Arab boy caught
in a crossfire between snipers, Liana is impelled to confront
her conflicts about identity and culpability. She must choose
between following the paths of darkness that have kept her bound
to her grieving and engulfing mother and her own sexual self-discovery
. Characters are drawn from Israel's long-forgotten past, members
of the 1940's Haganah and Jewish underground who find themselves
displaced amidst the chaotic and complex tensions of an Israel
just beginning to modernize and expand. Liana learns about her
mother's childhood in the ancient city, and her past in the wars.
Places and dates eventually yield to timeless truths as she is
able to use this heritage as her own mystical starting point.
Growing into a womanhood forever formed by the boundary-less spaces
of a lost geography and people, Liana's coming of age brings this
tumultuous region into startling light and relief.
"Edges
is an elegantly written, quite moving novel that has a lot to
say about love, identity, history and the meaning of nationality.
The book is worth reading alone for its superb language, but it
is gripping and unforgettable as well in its story telling and
evocation of place and emotions. It is a wonderful novel by an
author with a quite accomplished voice and style, one well deserving
a wide and receptive audience. "
—
Oscar Hijuelos, author of the Pulitzer-prize winning novel, The
Mambo King Sings Songs of Love
"In
Edges, Leora Skolkin-Smith skillfully tells the story of
a girl of fourteen in the wake of her father's suicide, brought
abruptly by her distraught mother from a comfortable suburban
Westchester to the harsh terrain of a young State of Israel. The
girl is caught in the maelstrom of political claims between Israel
and a West Bank, still part of the Kingdom of Jordan. The turmoil
both of the girl and her mother is graphically detailed as they
struggle to define themselves in the light of a haunted past and
present. The poetry of the girl's sexual awakening ripples through
many pages, softening the fierce realities of the conflict between
Arab and Jew. The pages evoke as well the memories of a shared
land, and the mother's childhood growing up in an old Jerusalem
before the city was separated by physical barriers, the religious,
cultural, divide between Arab and Jew easier to bridge. The author's
vivid sense of landscape, her gift for identifying with both mother
and daughter, Arab and Jew, gives the novel a unique sense of
balance and brings the reader, regardless of political conviction
into sympathy with this portrait of a vanished Jerusalem. Edges
is a powerful evocation of lost worlds which it is a joy to wander
back into."
— Mark
Mirsky, founder of Fiction Magazine, Pr. English at CCNY
"Edges
takes the reader to an Israel before the high walls formed, a
border, when instead metal wires hung like "hosiery lines" across
the land...Here, Skolkin-Smith's young heroine tries to shake
off her father's suicide and her mother's mourning by making an
escape with the missing son of an American diplomat...Skolkin-Smith,
in clear, burnished prose, fuses personal and political rifts
into an exhilirating debut novel."
— Philip Graham, Director, Creative Writing, U. of Illinois at
Urbana Champaign
Edges
is now available for pre-orders at: barnesandnoble.com, Baker
and Taylor, or from Enfield Distribution Company at: 603-632-7377
website: http://www.leoraskolkinsmith.com
Sample
pages from EDGES: Chapter One:
I flicked on the passenger light above my head. By my wristwatch
it was only three-thirty-seven p.m., New York time, but, when
I gazed out the plane window, the sky was full of coal-like clouds.
"Want
some chocolate?" My mother held an 18-ounce duty-free bar of Hershey's
almond chocolate under my nose. "It's seven more hours until we
reach Tel Aviv, will you survive?"
"No,"
I said.
That
summer, Jordan had given the few Israeli descendants of the ancient
city permission to dig up the graves on the Mount of Olives and
transport the souls and skeletons of their lost ones to the other
side of the border.
My
mother, my sister, Ivy and I sat on a packed El Al plane on our
way to Jerusalem to participate in a ceremony for an uncle I had
never met.
Dot
Elizar had been buried, my mother said, in the mixed cemetery
among the Arab and Jewish war heroes before the War of Independence
divided the city. Now he was going to be dug up and reburied in
the new Jerusalem. The Ceremony of the Graves was to take place
near the President's House.
Why
should I have cared about my uncle Elizar? For many years, we
had not visited Israel, though my mother had grown up there, in
the rugged and hot geography of what was known in the 1930s as:
Palestine. I remembered only vaguely going there as a baby, its
hot sun and my mother's childhood house on a limestone street
behind some eucalyptus trees.
It was June, 1963, I
was fourteen years old, and it was two years after my father's
suicide. My mother planned for a long stay in Jerusalem.
My
mother had never spoken about her brother Elizar or old Jerusalem.
The faces of World War II's displaced persons and their refugee
boats on the Mediterranean Sea did not appear in the same photographs
my mother showed me of herself in Palestine. A playful little
girl with short red hair, wearing boy's khaki shorts and hiking
boots. The rest of my mother's history I had put together loosely
from other pictures she kept in the basement of our Northern Westchester
home-glimpses of letters and more photographs of my mother, Ada
Silberfeld, the bigheaded woman, hugging the cedars trees of Abu
Tor during the bombings and shellings that shook the quiet streets
of Jerusalem by 1946. She had married my father, an American,
after coming over to New York Harbor with a chaperone, on a War
Brides ship from Haifa.
Now
she separated the chocolate squares into chunky shards with her
stubby fingers, pushing pieces at the back of her mouth, and making
a loud sucking noise. "The travel agent was such an idiot,"she
said, pulling at her tent dress. Her legs were bare and her summer
jacket was on backwards, the Bonwit Teller label glistening in
the soft plane light."But she did tell me we will land somewhere
in Europe for a few hours, for the plane to get more fuel."
"In
Paris?" I asked.
"Paris?
Why Paris? No, I am sure it will be in Switzerland. It will not
even be worth it to get off the airplane, Liana. But maybe they
will have some good Swiss chocolate on the plane for a change,
that is if the stewardesses get off to go make pee-pee in the
airport there."
"Oh."I
let the airplane magazine I had on my lap slide to the floor with
the unspoken embarrassment I felt sitting next to her.
We
had been in the air for several hours and the outside atmosphere
was changing into a velvety cloak of black and white. The odor
of fresh almonds and hardened cocoa from my mother's chocolate
permeated the enclosed air, as if the bar were breathing, exhaling
a warm, luscious scent.
"What's
the matter, Liana?" My mother licked her upper lip with her browned
tongue and then folded the silver foil over the remaining chocolate
in her hand."Talk to me darling," she said.
Her kindness pained me.I wished I could return it but I couldn't.
I wished I was happy about it but I wasn't. I did not want her
attention. I had come to prefer her neglecting me, demanding nothing
of me but to show up when she thought something she did-like preparing
dinner for Ivy and me that night, or asking me once if I needed
some fresh bath towels-might be as important as it used to be,
before.
The
splinters of chocolate had settled on her chest as if they were
the jewelry pieces meant to go with her loose outfit and manners.
"Aren't we stopping off somewhere else?" I asked.
"Look
Liana," my mother whispered into my ear. "We aren't going to tell
anyone in Israel about the accident."
Some
time after midnight on a mild summer night, my father had catapulted
off a country road in Katonah in his blue MG sports car, crashing
into the woods. There had been letters back and forth between
my father and his former psychiatrist which, found, proved he
had been thinking about ending his life, of letting go of the
ivory steering wheel of his MGjust that way. It had all been like
some premeditated murder on Perry Mason.
On
the airplane wall, by the entrance towards the pilot and his cockpit,
was a clock like they had in my junior high school. The giant
utility of timekeeping made me think about the days to come, how
slow they would go.
The
lights inside the plane dimmed to signal the approach of night.
Silhouetted
against the shiny sides of the coach in the first four rows of
seats were a group of dark-suited Hasidic men and their families.
Their curly black beards and side locks made them look like shadowed
rag dolls. Six or seven crates of their duty-free Smirvoff vodka
bottles were stashed under their seats. In 1963, the plane cabins
were small and packed with as many duty-free articles from the
airport store as passengers could carry on with them. Chocolate,
laundry detergent, Winston cigarette cartons and other untaxed
items from Idlewild airport cluttered the plane. I studied the
Hasidic men. Too fatherly, their bodies so close, like it was
with my mother. A nightmare of fathers in the wrong attire. They
bobbed and jiggled and splashed their messy outbursts of affection
onto their make- upless wives, their pale children. The vodka
and their full laughter- where were we going? To what world before?
It was completely without my father. And had nothing to do with
Ivy or me.
I
looked around my mother at my sister seated in the opposite aisle
seat. After my father's funeral, Ivy had started collecting records
of incantations from India or Africa, with record jackets on which
cameo pictures of spiritual amulets and naked black Warriors would
appear. She also made notations onto little index cards she took
from the high school library stack about the Amish who lived in
some of the colonial farmhouses further down the road from us.
She put a motto up on her bedroom wall in Westchester which read:
"The Amish people live kindly and decently. They love what is
. . . and are joyful."
She had already tried marijuana and knew about the places in the
woods in Katonah we could take some six packs of Colt 45 malt
liquor, and consider the all-embracing energy waves of nature.
We drank nips of Southern Comfort, too, in the cold, raking through
the Westchester snowdrifts in large rubber boots where sometimes
the rocks were stained with deer blood, fallen fragile and beautiful
animals. We had searched for hunter's tracks, to find enemies.
We had to be careful about how we moved about now, Ivy had said,
and about what we said, about what secret thoughts swam in our
brains, in case it had been our bad spiritual vibrations that
had made my father leave us, or that had made him do what he did.
Now Ivy was sipping from a container of Tropicana orange juice
she bought at the duty-free shop while we waited for our flight.
Ivy was sixteen. She was taller than me, with long, chestnut hair
and a thin, difficult face-small-eyed and sharp. Her long body
gave off the odor of cigarettes and soap. My moods were as changeable
and labile as my mother's, they darkened or lightened. Ivy often
prided herself on not being one of us at all and could easily
establish her 4emotional residence elsewhere.
Once
my mother was safe again, with her first family, and if I planned
it right, I could find a way to leave. I would find the places
my father told me about in Paris. I could wire back to my sister
and she could come, too. I will enjoy that, I thought, pulling
my sister out with me. Somehow, I thought I would stay in Israel
for only as long as it took me to find enough money to get to
Paris, to what I knew of the famous streets that could be described
in the large, sensual words Marcel Proust had brought my father
and me when I was still too young to understand what they meant.
Lyrical overtures about the loveless and abandoned. I had no knowledge
of airfares, but I believed the situation, all of us being in
Israel, once the plane landed, could be undone if I acted forcefully
enough.
After
my father's "accident," my mother could not recognize herself
in the picture of her life. If the white drifts on the ground
were tall and thick, she would let me stay home from school. She
lay silent in the house in Katonah, ringing her hands under her
bed sheets, stunned and outraged as if it was just at that moment
that she heard the news of my father's death. And then she would
look at me, look appealingly to me. She grew more careless about
herself as time went on. Her body was usually without undergarments
which gave the sheets a hot, wettish odor. Her hair and face creams
gave off a strong, fruity smell and tempered the raw coarse aromas
that got loose from her flesh. And then her strength appeared
more muscular in its war against grief and distress than I had
ever seen it. I wanted to be near it.
Sometimes
I stayed home from school and she took me into bed with her. We
watched television in her bed to-gether: "Our Miss Brooks" and
"The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," "Queen for A Day." We watched
a chimpanzee at Cape Canaveral complete his one day space flight
towards the moon. I believed I knew what we were doing together
those long, housebound mornings and afternoons. We were preparing
for the possibility that there would never be another man in our
lives, that we better get used to it being just us.
"Look."
My mother adjusted herself in her seat, reached into the left
pocket of her tent dress and whisked out an envelope my aunt had
sent her from One Metaduleh Street. She pulled out three recent
photographs, fanning them out with her fingers like a trick deck
of cards and holding them in front of my eyes. There was Jerusalem,"The
Border Confused City," the 1963 Life magazine article called it.
My mother had left the article on my bedroom bureau in Katonah.
"In a Pentateuchal sense of the word," said the article I read
that night two weeks ago, "Jerusalem is a geography that is everywhere
a matter of more or less chaos, looking still like a Biblical
place where the sea had not yet separated from the sky and the
land was not yet."
I
had looked up "Pentateuchal" in the dictionary and had not even
found a definition for that.
Now I stared at her photographs. The white Jerusalem houses with
their fences of barbed wire and warning signs in the fields; the
powerful, endlessly complex hills and recesses; the naked desert-like
earth and pearl-gray edifices whose boundaries were as open to
interpretation and vulnerable to disintegration as lines drawn
into the dust.
Copyright
© by Leora Skolkin-Smith. All right reserved. From Edges, Glad Day Books. ISBN 1-930180-14-4. Contact: skolkin@nyc.rr.com
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