Books by and for independent women

Hold On to the Sun by Michal Govrin

Michal Govrin‘s Hold On to the Sun is her first collection of short stories and essays. Govrin was born in Israel and has published numerous books of fiction and poetry, winning the Kugel Literary Prize and Acum Prize for her novels The Name and Snapshots respectively.

She is a poet and an award winning theatre director and has been named as one of the most influential literary figures of the last thirty years by the Salon du Livre.

Hold On to the Sun opens with the exquisitely emotive poem Won’t You See, before flowing into an essay, The Journey to Poland. It is here we begin to understand the emergent impact of the Holocaust on a young and gifted writer, her letter to her parents juxtaposing the slow realisation and knowledge of her mother surviving the death camp of Auschwitz against her own sudden and desperate need to visit her family’s former home in Poland.

Govrin’s prose is detailed and expressive, conveying with almost bewildering detail the unravelling of her mother’s tale, and her own growing sense of loss and confusion as she walks the streets of Wroclaw searching for clues to her family’s past.

Short stories follow, the triptych of La Promenade bringing a small group of characters wonderfully to life, working into the narrative of this seaside tale the ripples of the Holocaust in the fragmented stories of each of the individuals present.

Here Govrin shows real skill, detailing and painting each character vividly with the simplest of nuances, lending rich histories that are barely hinted at within the context of the tale, even if, on reflection, they are all a little clichéd.

Between Two and Four is short and unsettling, flowing from the mundane to eerie threat with consummate and chilling ease. Evening Ride reinforces Govrin’s ability to paint more with less, evoking and inferring far more than is written, painting a muted past and a vivid present in the constant turn of a pedal.

And yet Elijah’s Sabbath Day feels vaguely pointless, seemingly more of a character piece than a short story no matter how beautifully written, lacking depth for all its detail. Against this, The Dance of The Pythia is imaginative and strange, the landscape of the imagination given free rein by Govrin’s ability with words.

This is echoed in part by the lesser The Thinker, although this too ends oddly, leaving me vaguely unsatisfied and unclear as to it’s purpose.

The book ends with an interview between author and editor; interesting yet somehow cold and uninspiring after the prose and essays that preceded it.

Perhaps the most powerful piece here is the essay Facing Evil, in which Govrin visits  Auschwitz with her eldest daughter, reflecting on the impact and legacy of the Holocaust, encapsulated in this monument to that event. Here the emotive mixes with the intellectual, transitioning between her own personal horror and thoughts of what Auschwitz stands for as they wander its confines.

Hold On to the Sun is deeply thoughtful and imaginative, showcasing Govrin’s skills as a writer and an essayist, both in her formative years (the short stories are from the 60’s and 70’s) and beyond. As such it could have been stronger and yet the essays and the short stories highlighted above make this a more than worthwhile read to anyone interested in fiction or the Holocaust.

Hold On to the Sun was published by The Feminist Press late last year. Buy it from Amazon for £11.69.

José Kilbride