Sidura Ludwig

Contentious family dynamics are at the heart of Sidura Ludwig’s collection of linked stories, You Are Not What We Expected. Set primarily in a Jewish community in suburban Thornhill, Ontario, Ludwig’s stories chronicle the domestic tribulations of the Levine family and other characters from the neighbourhood. These are tightly written stories of people at odds with one another and with their circumstances. Chief among Sidura’s cast of characters are seventy-something Isaac and his sister Elaine Levine. Isaac has moved back to Ontario at Elaine’s behest to help take care of her grandchildren, Ava and Adam, after the death of Elaine’s husband Oscar. Elaine’s daughter Carly, the children’s mother, has skipped town and is no longer in the picture. Elderly Isaac, cantankerous with strong opinions and eccentric fixations, is not shy about making demands and voicing objections. In “The Flag” he becomes enraged when he sees two flags flying on a single pole in front of a Jewish school, with the Israeli flag flying under the Canadian. He berates the principal over this insult to Israel but can only watch, exhausted and breathless, as his concerns are dismissed with platitudes. Later he returns to the school and commits an act of righteous thievery. In “The Elaine Levine Club,” Elaine asks Isaac to mind Ava and Adam while she meets with a group of women she encountered on Facebook, all of whom share the same name: Elaine Levine. And in “The Happiest Man on Sunset Strip,” Isaac, older now and living with the effects of a debilitating stroke in a long-term care facility, receives a visit from his grand-niece Ava. Ava, home from Israel for a wedding and intending to stay with her uncle for only a few minutes, is nonplussed when Isaac asks her to take him to McDonald’s, and then grows resentful and increasingly desperate as things spiral out of control. Ludwig’s simply constructed sentences are a pleasure to read. Her straightforward prose is lucid, precise and vividly alive with evocative detail. These gently humorous stories are not overly complex, but gain emotional heft from the characters’ intricate backstories. You Are Not What We Expected is a thoroughly entertaining and notable short-fiction debut from a compassionate author whose great strength is depicting the subtle (and not-so-subtle) tensions that simmer within families.… (más)

Set in Thornhill, a suburban community with a significant Jewish population on the northern edge of Toronto, Ludwig’s short stories focus mostly on Elaine Levine and her 72-year-old brother Isaac. As the collection opens, Isaac has returned to Canada from L.A. to help his younger, recently widowed sister, who has been saddled with raising her grandchildren. Elaine’s daughter, Carly, plagued by the demons of drug addiction, took off for Las Vegas a couple of years before, leaving her son and daughter in the care of her parents. She never came back. When Oscar, Elaine’s husband succumbs to the aggressive Parkinson’s Disease that forced him into retirement, Elaine contacts her brother, calling upon him to abandon his peripatetic lifestyle and assist her with the kids.

Two of Ludwig’s stories focus on curmudgeonly, disruptive Isaac’s need to create excitement for himself in this staid, mostly middle-class Canadian community. He makes a scene at a supermarket for falsely advertising that it’s the largest kosher grocery store in North America, and he takes a Jewish private-elementary-school principal to task for inappropriately flying the Israeli flag below the Canadian one on the same pole. Other stories that round out the collection focus on Elaine’s grandchildren’s troubles, the failing marriages of women who have married into orthodox Jewish families, and other kids who are trying to weather familial dysfunction and ruptures. Ludwig’s is a nuanced, finely observed collection, which I enjoyed reading.

Summaries of a few of the stories

“Flag”

Isaac, a 72-year-old man has recently returned to Canada from Israel. It’s not at all clear why. Having lived in seven different countries, he is put off by the whiteness of his neighbourhood in Thornhill, a predominantly Jewish suburb on the northern edge of Toronto. Isaac’s sister, who urged him to come back, thinks he needs to make more of an effort socially, but it’s evident that this elderly man, who once worked productively on an Israeli kibbutz, is at loose ends in Canada.

The story revolves around his act of stealing an Israeli flag from the front yard of a private Jewish elementary school. The flag has been placed lower down on the same pole as the Canadian one, an impropriety that inflames Isaac. He has an angry encounter with the school’s principal about the disrespect in flying one nation’s flag below another’s. When the administrator fails to rectify the situation, Isaac takes matters into his own hands. He reckons that stealing the flag will provide him with a good story to tell the religious Jews he sometimes visits.

Isaac has his seamstress-landlady remake the flag into a shirt. Later, when he stands provocatively at the schoolyard fence, the young children out for recess can see it’s an Israeli flag he’s wearing. Isaac feels particular resentment towards a religious Jewish boy whose tzitzit (tassels) dangle from a prayer shawl. He wants to yell at the kid’s teacher “something about the baselessness of God, the stupidity of Jews like her who teach children to save the world by holing themselves up in dingy classrooms and studying ancient texts that are no more than fairy tales!” He feels empowered when he’s noticed and chased off school property by the school administrator.

Ludwig packs a lot into this short story, exploring the invisibility of an elderly man who returns to Canada after so many years away that he’s almost an immigrant. She conveys a sense of his displacement and his inability connect with other Jews in his community and she raises matters concerning Jewish identity and culture. Isaac’s orientation is political. Though not a “Sabra”, a Jew born in Israel, he seems to regard himself as an Israeli national. He scorns the piety and symbols of orthodox Judaism, angrily remembering the men and the boys in Israel: “those anti-State, freeloading, they-don’t-even-pay-taxes-but-they-use-the-state-of-the-art-hospitals-for-the-births-of-their-thirteen-children, no-good religious Jews” and who “run from what really matters.”

* * *
”Pufferman”

He was once named Sean, but, early on, Jared, his older brother, called him Puffer and the name stuck. Even then he was fat. Now, when the obese boy climbs out of the pool, walking towards his Filipina babysitter, Dayle, he can’t wrap a towel around his body: “it’s like the cape of an overweight superhero. Pufferman.” With Jared away at summer camp, Puffer is lonely. Jared sends him letters about camp life. He writes about the bears, says he’s being eaten by them, and suggests that Puffer tell their mother about Jared’s lost limbs. Maybe that’ll get her attention. While one brother eats, the other is being eaten . . .

Puffer’s mother is distracted, always on the phone complaining to her friends about her estranged adulterous husband’s latest offence. Dayle, the nanny, takes advantage of the situation. Sight unseen, she fills Puffer with junk food, which he eats compulsively— then takes the clothes he’s outgrown, sending them off to the Philippines for her own son.

“Puffer” is a sad story about loneliness, adult self-absorption, rage—and human parasitism. In Puffer’s world, no one really gets what he wants or the attention he needs—except Dayle perhaps. When the despairing Puffer accidentally-on-purpose almost drowns in the family’s pool, she fishes him out—but is it because she cares or because Puffer is her meal-ticket?

* * *
“You Are Not What We Expected”

This story focuses on Reena, a young Australian woman who’s been living with her husband and young daughter, Sarah, in the home of her Jewish-Canadian in-laws. Reena met and married Shalom, her soft-spoken husband, three years before when in she was attending a seminary in Israel. Shalom brought her back to Canada, and they’ve lived with his parents ever since. It’s not been a happy time, and now the troubles have come to a head: Reena’s overbearing mother-in-law is ejecting her from the family for all of the reasons below (and more):
*Reena is not what they expected;
*Sarah might not even be Shalom’s child—she doesn’t look like him;
*Reena could’ve returned to school, but she did not;
*Reena keeps too much to herself.

Passive Reena keeps waiting for Shalom to do something about this distressing domestic arrangement. Fact is: Shalom is a pushover. He does not stand by his wife. Meanwhile, Reena’s sister, Simi, regularly texts from Israel, urging the young woman to leave. The texts go unanswered. This, after all, is the story of someone who is psychologically stuck.

Most of Reena’s story unfolds in a Kosher coffee shop, where she works as a barista. Passive and incompetent, Reena feels inferior to her colleague Priscilla, a take-charge Filipina immigrant, who spent her early years in Canada living in the dank basement of the wealthy Canadians whose children she minded. Hard-working Priscilla is now on her way to re-qualifying as a nurse, which will allow her to bring her family to Canada. She has an enviable, natural way with customers, anticipating their every need. By contrast, Reena is utterly inept, badly burning her hand while making hot chocolate one day and failing to assist an elderly man to the bathroom on another. The words she says to reassure him after he’s fallen—“You’re not alone”— ring as hollow as her mother-in-law’s to her. She is no more there for him than her husband and his parents are there for her. The realization is significant: It’s the initiatory spark of agency. Reena now knows she will be able to leave soon. You can’t really assist anyone else until you’re able to help yourself.
* * * … (más)