Far To Go (32 page)

Joseph (Pepik) Bauer 1933 – 2008
Anneliese (Meuller) Bauer 1940 –

THE
TRAIN
OF
MEMORY
SLEEPS
ON
ITS
TRACKS
. At night, in the station, the shadows gather around it, reaching out to touch its cool black sides. The train stretches back, far out of eyesight. Where it comes from is anyone’s guess.

At dawn the ghosts retreat, take their place as shadows in the corners of the lofty-domed station. The train sighs on its tracks, a traveller hoisting very heavy bags. We roll over in our beds; we cough, stretch a little; the train of memory starts to move forward. Slowly at first, but gathering speed. The landscape drifts by like the last wisps of a dream. In the early morning hours the train begins to move into the opposite of memory. Into a future time when someone will look back at us now, wondering what our days were like and why we did the things we did. Or why we did not act, as the case might equally be.

Someone will be unable to make our lives make sense.

The train has no answers, only forward momentum. We open our eyes; it is moving very quickly now. Moving always ahead. It never arrives.

Many thanks to:

The Canada Council for the Arts

The Ontario Arts Council

The Toronto Arts Council

The Hadassah–Brandeis Institute

The EU’s Culture Programme and the Odyssey Program 2007

Le Réseau Européen des Centres Culturels de Rencontre

IMEC’s Abbaye d’Ardenne in Normandy, France

Schloss Bröllin in Pasewalk, Germany

The Milkwood Artist Residence in Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic

Michael Crummey

Steven Heighton

Lucy Pick

Hanna Spencer

Sarah MacLachlan and everyone at House of Anansi Press

Mary-Anne Harrington at Headline in the UK

Claire Wachtel at HarperCollins in the US

Jacqueline Smit at Orlando/AW Bruna in the Netherlands

Ornella Robbiati at Frassinelli/Sperling & Kupfer in Italy

Zoë Waldie at Rogers, Coleridge, and White

Anne McDermid, Martha Magor Webb, and Monica Pacheco

The New Quarterly

I read extensively on the Kindertransport and on the lives of the Czech Jews around the time of the Munich agreement. While my sources in their entirety are too numerous to mention here, I would like to acknowledge the following:
The Jews of Bohemia & Moravia: A Historical Reader
, edited by Wilma Iggers;
Letters from Prague 1939–1941
, edited by Raya Czerner Shapiro and Helga Czerner Weinberg;
Hanna’s Diary 1938–1941
by Hanna Spencer;
Pearls of Childhood
by Vera Gissing; and
Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport
by Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer.

Tommy Berman, one of the original Kindertransport children, shared with me his memoirs, as well as the letters written from his birth parents in Czechoslovakia to his adoptive parents in Scotland. While the story here is not his, he provided the inspiration.

Many thanks, as always, to Thomas, Margot, and Emily Pick. I would also, and most especially, like to thank my partner Degan Davis, whose help on every level was invaluable, and my wonderful editor Lynn Henry, who I had the pleasure of working with for the third time. I couldn’t be more grateful.

Meet Alison Pick

ALISON
PICK
was born in Toronto in 1975, the first child of Thomas and Margot Pick. She grew up in Kitchener, Ontario, and spent her summers as a child in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. She attended Westmount Public School, the
K-W
Bilingual School, and Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate and Vocational School, and spent one miserable year at boarding school, an experience she was not eager to repeat. She earned a BA (Hons) in psychology from the University of Guelph, where she took a creative writing course as an elective in her final year. Soon after, she was devoting all her spare time to crafting similes and metaphors.

In the fall of 2000, Alison participated in the Sage Hill Poetry Colloquium under the leadership of Tim Lilburn, where she met her future life partner, Degan Davis. The two spent the first years of the century house-sitting across Canada while Alison wrote her first poetry collection,
Question & Answer
. The title section of the book won the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Award for most promising unpublished writer under thirty-five in Canada and the 2005 National Magazine Award for Poetry. The publication of
Question & Answer
also marked the beginning of an editorial relationship with Lynn Henry, which went on to include both of Alison’s first two novels,
The Sweet Edge
(Raincoast Books, 2005) and
Far to Go
(House of Anansi Press, 2010).

Alison first embarked on her fiction-writing career as a participant in the Banff Centre for the Arts Wired Writing Studio, where she was paired with novelist and short story writer Anne Fleming. After penning a number of short stories (the thought of which now makes the author cringe), the idea for a novel presented itself and Alison ran with it. Based partially on a fifty-day Arctic canoe trip she took in 1997,
The Sweet Edge
was published to rave reviews across the country, became a
Globe and Mail
Top 100 book, and was optioned for film.

Alison was accepted into the MPhil program at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2004. The degree offered a creative option, and in lieu of academic papers Alison submitted poems written in response to the program’s extensive reading requirements. These poems eventually became her 2008 poetry collection,
The Dream World
, Alison’s favourite of her own books. The title poem was included in
The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008
, and another series from the book won the
CBC
Literary Award for Poetry.

In the winter of 2007, Alison began research for the novel that would become
Far to Go
. Originally titled
Thursday’s Child
(from “Thursday’s child has far to go”), it explores a similar historical circumstance to the one Alison’s own grandparents experienced when leaving Czechoslovakia.
Far to Go
sold in five countries before publication.

Alison’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in every major literary journal in Canada, and in magazines and newspapers including the
Globe and Mail
, the
National Post
,
The
Walrus
magazine,
enRoute
magazine, and
Toronto Life
. She is on the faculty at the Banff Centre for the Arts’ Wired Writing Studio, and currently lives in Toronto, where she is at work on a memoir.

Questions and Answers with Alison Pick

Originally published on Torontoist.com in a somewhat different format. Interview by Erin Balser. Reprinted with permission.

Torontoist: Describe Far to Go in one sentence.

Alison Pick:
Part mystery, part love story,
Far to Go
tells the tale of one family’s struggle with war and with the legacy of secrecy as it unfolds down the generations.

TO: How long did you work on Far to Go? Did the process differ from previous projects?

AP:
I started working on
Far to Go
in January of 2007. I spent four months reading and planning, and then headed to Europe for residencies in France, Germany, and the Czech Republic. So, right away the process was different in that I knew I needed to be “on location” to get a feel for the place I was writing about. My first novel,
The Sweet Edge
, was contemporary, and
Far to Go
is historical, so I also had to do much more extensive research into the little details of daily life. That said, by setting the book against a dramatic backdrop such as the lead-up to the Second World War, part of my work was already done. I had a series of actual events and preexisting political tensions. All I had to do was drop my characters into the scene and see how they’d react.

TO: You’ve written both poetry collections and fiction. Is your creative process different for these different projects?

AP:
Yes, very different. A poem is a short burst of inspiration, written in maybe one morning, then honed and sharpened over weeks or, more often, months. Since a novel has a much larger canvas, I have to pace myself differently. With long fiction, I use the creative burst to write an outline, maybe twenty or thirty pages. Then begins the slower and more deliberate process of colouring in the outline (actually writing the scenes). The final result deviates wildly from the original plan, but having a plan in place gives me confidence to keep writing. Alistair MacLeod once said to me, regarding novel-writing, that a carpenter trying to build a house wouldn’t just grab a bunch of nails and two-by-fours and start banging. That got me thinking! Once I’d given myself permission to “plan,” fiction became a whole lot more manageable. And, of course, with a poem, there’s no plan.

There are those who think it’s impossible to write both good poetry and fiction, whereas I find that each genre feeds the other. It’s like exercising the same muscle in different ways. Writing both makes me stronger.

TO: What was the editorial process like with Far to Go?

AP:
It was a pleasure. I worked with Lynn Henry, who edited both my first collection of poetry,
Question & Answer
, and my novel
The Sweet Edge
. We knew each other well at the start of the editorial process, which makes everything so much easier. It’s like the difference between going on a first date and being married. I knew from past experience that I could trust her—both her judgment and her aesthetic—and that she understood where the book was trying to go as well as, if not better than, I did.

TO: Were you tempted to make major changes when the galleys arrived, or is this novel truly finished? If it is, when did you know it was truly finished?

AP:
I wasn’t tempted to make any major changes, no. Being a bit of a perfectionist—at least where my writing is involved—there are always little niggles about sentences I might have tweaked differently or punctuation I might have altered. Silly things. In the big picture, though, I knew the book was finished because I couldn’t stand to look at it any longer. My energy for it was completely gone. I’ve learned that this is the way to tell that I’ve taken a book as far as I’m able.

TO: Anything you wish you’d done differently?

AP:
Far to Go
is partially about the Kindertransport, a series of trains that left Czechoslovakia in 1938 and ’39, taking young Jewish children to safety. In 2009, a special “Winton train” traveled to London via the original Kindertransport route, and in an ideal world my book would have been published to coincide with that event. On board the 2009 train were some surviving (now elderly) “Winton children” and their descendants. Their trip marked the seventieth anniversary of the original Kindertransports. So, from a marketing and publicity perspective, as well as from an emotional one, it would have been nice if the book had been out. That said, there’s no hurrying the creative process. I needed that extra year to finish
Far to Go
, and I’m glad that I took it.

TO: What do you think of the cover?

AP:
I love the cover. It’s by Alysia Shewchuk—her first effort!—she really nailed the ethos of the book.

TO: Are you working on anything new?

AP:
While writing
Far to Go
I was also taking notes for my next book, which is something I haven’t done before, but the material was presenting itself and I didn’t want to lose it. It’s a memoir about a depression I experienced while I was exploring my family’s lost Judaism. So, yes, I’ve technically started, and have hundreds of pages of rough notes. The key word being “rough.” This fall I’ll be busy teaching at the Banff Centre, promoting
Far to Go
, and hanging out with my baby, so it’ll probably be 2011 by the time I’m able to actually sit down and start shaping the notes into an actual book. I’m looking forward to it, though, I must admit. There’s nothing like the feeling of seeing a new project take shape, form itself from scribbles and half-thoughts into something with narrative arc and coherence.

In Search of the Past

Originally published in
Quill & Quire
magazine, September 2010. Reprinted with permission.

Alison Pick explores her family’s hidden traditions in a novel about war and Jewish identity.

By Micah Toub

ALISON
PICK
pulls some papers out of her bag and passes them to me across the table. They’re worn and stained, though she tells me the document is only a few years old. “This is something my dad did,” she says as I look over the printout of an Excel spreadsheet. We’re chatting on the patio of her regular coffee spot, a block away from her home in Toronto’s Annex. About ten pages in total, the papers record the story of her grandparents’ escape from Czechoslovakia during the Second World War through an analysis of the various stamps and notes made in the couple’s joint passport.

The first entry reveals that her grandfather was in Egypt on a business trip when the Nazis marched into the Czech Sudetenland along the country’s border regions on October 1, 1938. He never returned to his homeland. The spreadsheet then shows how, over the next three years, he and his wife travelled, separately and together, through Europe and the Middle East—Italy, Greece, Palestine, and elsewhere—attempting to secure safe passage from Europe.

They eventually did get out, making their way from London to Trinidad and then up to Canada. But when they finally settled in Sherbrooke, Quebec, in 1941, they had left something behind—their religion.