Maya Khankhoje is a Montreal-based writer whose parents migrated from two different continents so that she could be born in a third.
The Man Who Swam into History . By Robert A. Rosenstone. 1st Books
This is one of those occasions in which this reviewer will not attempt to be academic and will certainly not refrain from being subjective. Robert A. Rosenstone, the author of The Man Who Swam into History tends to have that effect on his readers, or so I would imagine, because after reading this book, I want to lay my hands on everything else he has written, including Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed, later brought to the screen in gory Technicolor as Reds by none other than director/actor Warren Beatty - famous for his liberal politics and infamous for his even more liberal sexual ones. Rosenstone ensnares his readers by weaving the thread of his family's history - with equal measures of adventure and misadventure - through the woof and the warp of the history of the Jewish Diaspora, all the while spinning a delightful tale.
To better understand the register of this polyphonic tale of three generations, we must understand what the author had to say about the English synagogue in which his maternal grandparents had been married ninety-five years before and which was being converted into condominiums:
"Stepney Green Synagogue was, in short, like any work of history. To save the past -- as biographer, auto biographer, memoirist, or historian--we translate the remaining traces of it into language and forms of writing, which necessarily alter and fragment things, highlight some moments and erase others. In writing history we describe and interpret moments and events which participants experienced and interpreted in far different ways. This is to say that, as with the synagogue, we are always altering the remains of the past for our own needs in the present. With words (or images, or sounds) we attempt to stimulate a lost world, but the life we bestow upon the dead is not one they would recognize as their own."
Robert A. Rosenstone's cast of characters include a grandfather who "swam" to Canadian shores via Russia and Romania, another one who regularly landed at the doorstep of his lifelong mistress by way of movie theatres he never frequented, grandmothers who prevented rising dough and families from collapsing, assorted cousins and uncles who were either racketeers or communists and the women of the family who were either wild or tame, beautiful or homely or all of the above. And of course, the author a.k.a Rabin A. Rotenstein, who grew up to become a historian at Caltech.
The Man Who Swam Into History , an "overlap of autobiography, biography and fiction", to quote from a lecture from the author, will appeal to Montrealers and mavens of The Main, where a great part of the action takes place. It will also delight history lovers and those who understand that "visionary truth" thrives in the relationship between fact and art. The minor repetitions and typos that blemish this lovely narrative render it all the more human.