Leah Hager Cohen’s new novel dances with lyrical playfulness and emotional depth. It follows the parallel journeys of two young protagonists who both feel lonely in different ways.
On the Fro side of the book, highly literate Annamae is growing up in present-day Manhattan. She’s loved by her mother, her brother, and her nana, but none of them understands her ache to connect with other people. “A Friend. A Friend. A Friend. A Friend,” she blurts, frustrated. Meanwhile, Annamae feels haunted by the M. C. Escher print of one hand drawing another. She refuses to complete a fiction assignment for her English class, because she doesn’t think it’s right to create characters whose thoughts and movements she can control completely.
On the To side is Ani, who cannot read at all but must find her own way to survive in a harsher, more indifferent, pre-industrial reality after her mother dies in a cave. Annamae’s and Ani’s narratives play out at opposite ends of the book; readers can flip it and read either story first. Some of the same objects — a tiny stoppered glass bottle necklace with a mystery message inside, a penny, and a leather-bound journal — cross between stories, though the two girls themselves never meet.
Cohen’s short chapters are carefully crafted and move quickly. They intrigue us with one-word headings: “Unknown,” “Forgetfulness,” “Knife,” “Belonging,” “Bees,” “Ferryman,” and “Havruta.” Lyrical metaphors capture our attention. Here is Ani describing the inescapable fury of her baby half-sister’s colic: “Her cries were like the floss of milkweed pods: they carried everywhere, snagged on everything.”
Although Ani’s narrative is related in the first person, it is Annamae’s third-person story, with its deep interweaving of Judaic lore, that has more of an emotional tug. Rav Harriett, a friend of Annamae’s mother, invokes Jewish folklore, midrash, and stories from the Talmud. These teachings give Annamae the space and perspective she needs to begin to integrate her imagined realm into the worldly one.
Cohen’s latest work of fiction does not provide answers for either girl. What is certain, however, is that Judaism offers both of them loving paths through the unknown.
Sharon Elswit, author of The Jewish Story Finder and a school librarian for forty years in NYC, now resides in San Francisco, where she shares tales aloud in a local JCC preschool and volunteers with 826 Valencia to help students write their own stories and poems.
