By the time Rebecca walked in on her father violently murdering her mother before turning the shotgun on himself, the 13-year-old precocious little Jewish girl had already been emotionally orphaned for some time. Her parents had been forced to flee Hitler’s Germany in 1936 and had arrived in America broken people; all remnants of their once-vibrant lives and marriage had already been destroyed. Her father had once taught mathematics in Munich and her mother had been a serious student of classical piano.
The Schwarts family settled in a small rural town in upstate New York where Rebecca’s father found backbreaking work as a gravedigger. He was often taunted by the upstate local thugs who would shout at him mean bitter words – “Gravedigger! Kraut! Nazi! Jew!” – which would leave her father muttering to himself.
Rebecca’s mother was always impossibly distant, almost otherworldly, as if the life force had been mercilessly sucked out of her. Rebecca was left adrift with her two older brothers and the three siblings would often feed off each other for attention and comfort. Most days, the family home was drenched with uncomfortable silences broken only by her father’s increasingly frequent drunken rages. For the young Rebecca, life was synonymous with an almost nauseating level of continual fear and uncertainty.
Joyce Carol Oates’ writing in her new novel, “The Gravedigger’s Daughter,” is spellbinding and raw. She is a mesmerizing storyteller who seems almost unnaturally able to enter the tormented inner lives of her characters, particularly when channeling the voice of Rebecca, surely her alter-ego here.
A menacing world of men
Oates’ prose is exquisitely evocative of the early 1950s, a time when it seemed almost natural for a girl to be afraid of her father, her brother, her boyfriend and, most of all, her own confused yearnings. Rebecca’s world is shrouded by a menacing fear of men that chases her throughout her adult life and is inexplicably interwoven with her longing for them. As she matures, she readily accepts shame and humiliation as normal companions to her emerging sexuality.
Rebecca needs desperately to find a safe haven, a place for herself in the world, but she seems at times almost unable to find her own language, a way to decipher her emotions and experiences. She is haunted by the tortured maniacal voice of her dead father seemingly warning her from the grave to hide from everyone, to mask her feelings, to please and appease the men she meets, to hide her weaknesses and conceal her intelligence. In short, to disappear. And she almost does.
Rebecca remains uneasy around men, mute when others deride the Jews in her presence, secretive about her past and drawn to men who abuse her. It is as if her father’s eroding identity, his loss of self, his embarrassment and degradation have become her own.
What does it feel like to go through most of your life pretending to be who you are not? What kind of metamorphosis goes on inside someone who continually denies what is most essential about them? How much energy does it take? What allows it to break down?
Oates tackles the large questions of identity and self-loathing and longing and grief and how they mutate over time. In this ferocious work in which it is hard to imagine there isn’t some autobiographical underpinnings, she exposes for us the tragedy of a woman who has mastered the art of polished and manufactured womanhood but remains cut off from her deepest longings and distinctiveness. When Rebecca finally finds the courage to emerge from her own inarticulateness and leaps into uncharted territory, we jump in with her gasping for breath alongside.
Oates is an esteemed award-winning writer, critic, poet, essayist and a distinguished professor of the humanities at Princeton University. She has commented in countless interviews that her parents had little education and encouraged her passion for writing while she was still in high school in Lockport, N.Y. This novel takes place in upstate New York where the author was raised. She dedicates this fine book to “my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern, the ‘gravedigger’s daughter.”‘
Elaine Margolin is a freelance book reviewer and essayist in Hewlett, N.Y.
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FICTION
The Gravedigger’s Daughter
Joyce Carol Oates
$26.95
