The Shovel and the Loom     by Carl Friedman, Translated by Jeannette K. Ringold Original title: Twee koffers vol Original language: Dutch Original year: 1993 Published by Persea Books Pub. Date: September 1998 Format: Paperback, 176 pages Dimensions: 0.49 x 7.22 x 5.27 in. ISBN: 089255231X List Price: $12.00, £7.63 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £6.87 Buy online from Amazon.com for $9.60 Published by Persea Books, New York Pub. Date: 1996 Format: 168 pages Not available for ordering

Click on image to see enlargement

Carl Friedman made her debut in 1991 with the successful short novel Nightfather and more than fulfilled the promise of that with her second book, The Shovel and the Loom, published two years later. It is set at the end of the 1960s, at the time of the Vietnam war, the inhumanity of which contributes to its heroine’s scepticism about the existence of God. Chaya, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, is studying philosophy at university and, to make ends meet, takes part-time work in the run-down Jewish Quarter of Antwerp as a nanny in a strict Hasidic household. She falls under the spell of their three-year-old son Simcha, whose accidental death at the end of the novel turns her life in a new direction.


The story is told with an economy that makes it the more moving and with a sly humour that lightens some of its more painful moments, but the plot hardly matters. It is the themes with which the book deals that make it so compelling. Foremost is the uncompromising picture of what it means to be Jewish, the petty acts of prejudice that have to be endured, the constant questioning of Jewish separateness and identity. It lacks the self-indulgence and sentimentality typical of American novels on this theme. Far from playing the professional Jew, Carl Friedman prefers not to discuss the matter in interviews.


In any case, the meaning of Jewishness is only one side of the novel’s master theme, which is how one deals with the past. Chaya herself is relating the story long after the event and, as is made clear in the last chapter, has dealt with it constructively. Her mother, on the other hand, tries to deny the experience of Auschwitz by hiding from it in a cosy world of unyielding domesticity. Midway between is her father who, after years of adapting to his new post-war life, suddenly takes it into his head to try and locate two suitcases he had buried in 1943 when hiding from the Gestapo. It is these that give the novel its title in Dutch, which can be translated as ‘two bags full’. From this point of view, then, the lessons to be drawn might apply equally to the victims of contemporary Bosnia or Rwanda.

My mother had strictly forbidden me to go with Shrulik. She said that he stank like a nest of mice. And perhaps that was so, but we loved the old man, and after school we crowded around him. Sometimes he let five of us at the same time climb onto his cart. There we’d sit, on top of the rags, while he, like a croaking horn, would call out ‘Kinder, shayne kinder!»* as though he was offering us for sale.

One day, Shrulik was dead. A neighbour woman said that he had been a hundred and twenty years old, just like Moses. Not only had I believed it then, but I was still willing to believe it. Standing in front of the empty restaurant, I missed Shrulik desperately. Suddenly I understood very well why my father was ready to go to any lengths to retrieve a couple of suitcases with mouldy memories. I myself wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to dig up the long-dead Shrulik if that were possible. I would help him to his feet, change his shroud for his worn black coat, and brush a clump of earth from his beard just to see him push his cart loaded with rags over the cobblestones one more time. And then, just as before, the wind would blow his sidecurls upward, as though his hat were sprouting wings.

I continued walking and turned the corner. A human being was not only who he had been but also with whom and where he had been. He was the words he had heard and the voices with which they had been spoken; he was the images he had seen, the smells he had smelled, and all the hands that had touched him. My mother might say that the past has no importance, but why was she forever busy exorcising it? Every day, all over again, she had to bury Auschwitz under cake recipes and teas: reverse archaeology. No wonder she opposed my father’s plans. She feared that in digging for his suitcases he would expose her Pompeii. (p. 25-6, tr. Jeannette K Ringold)

* (Yiddish: Children, lovely children!) Babel Guide ed.