By Annette Meyers
As an oil painting ages, its paint may become increasingly transparent, and sometimes the ghost of another painting that had been painted over will reappear. When these occur, they are called "repentances," an English translation of the Italian "pentimento."
I have used "repentances" not in a religious sense but to invoke an artistic phenomenon. Yet, the religious/moral presence of the word "repentance" hovers beneath the life of my characters like the ghost of an earlier painting.
REPENTANCES is set in 1936, in the Jewish immigrant community of New York City. My characters are, for the most part, secular non-observant Jews, more worried about their struggle to survive in their new land than in continuing the orthodox religious practices of the Old World. They are holding on by a thread, physically and psychologically. But throughout, they remain very conscious of their culture, which is their religion.
In the winter of 1936, as Europe is sliding inexorably toward World War, the Jewish immigrant community in New York grows desperate to get its loved ones out of the Old Country and to America.
Nathan Ebanholz is one of these immigrants. Nathan is about to make the final payment on passage to America for his wife Miriam and three-year-old daughter Rayzela, whom he has never seen. He has found an apartment in the Bronx. Everything is ready. But Nathan's joy is short-lived. A tragedy has occurred. The ship bringing his wife and daughter is already at sea, but Miri and Rayzela are not on board.
REPENTANCES is set in two parts. The first deals with the consequences of a terrible lie. As a result, a crime is committed, two crimes, in fact, a murder and a kidnapping. The lie and the subsequent crime impact the lives of all of the characters.
In the second part of the novel, as the setting moves to a small New Jersey town and then back to New York, the past and the present meet head on. Time has passed, a war has been fought and won, but the past can never really stay buried.
The idea for REPENTANCES has been with me for decades. My mother, in the late 1920s, after word came of her mother's sudden death in Poland, made arrangements to bring her thirteen-year-old brother Benjamin to America. After everything was ready, she received the news that Benjamin had died of consumption, and the man with whom she'd made the arrangements - he had defrauded many trusting people - had fled to Canada, where he was arrested. My mother made the long bus trip to Toronto to testify against him.
REPENTANCES is not my mother's story, but the anguish of her loss and its aftermath have haunted me since I heard it. It became a stepping-off place for my novel.
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