RONIT LENTIN's writing focuses on themes of ethnicity and gender, and the complicated intersections of both with questions of identity. Her previous novel, Night Train to Mother, portrayed a woman in search of and reclaiming a strong female line of inheritance, fractured and lost through the events of the Holocaust.
In her latest novel, Songs on the Death of Children, Lentin returns to the theme of inherited grief and loss, but this time her treatment is more urgent, more immediate. The central character, Patricia Goldman, has grown up as the isolated only child of German Jewish parents, who made their way to Ireland after the second World War, and named their daughter Patricia in honour of the country which took them in, however grudgingly. Driven to be an over achiever by the expectations of her taciturn father, Patricia is a successful investigative journalist, not least because she is sleeping with her (married) editor.
The death of a young girl whose case she has been covering for her newspaper precipitates a crisis and an intense confrontation with her mother, in which Patricia learns for the first time that her parents had another daughter before the war. Given to neighbours in an attempt to save her from the camps, this child could not be traced at the end of the war, and her parents have never mentioned her existence again. Stunned by this new knowledge, Patricia leaves for Israel on a quest for her cultural identity and history, for her lost sister, and ultimately for an autonomous self, free of the burden of her parents' past.
Once the stage has been set and Patricia arrives in Israel, the novel settles into a confident narrative pace. Patricia's role as a journalist reporting on the intifada and her project to collect interviews with both Palestinian and Israeli women for a book provide an effective basis for Lentin to explore and reveal some of the many complexities of Middle Eastern politics. Passages where characters debate and/or represent differing perspectives on the intifada are impassioned and enlightening. Lent in has created characters who are well drawn: strong, articulate, argumentative, all to some extent damaged by historical or actual violence in their lives, whether as aggressors or as victims, but more often as both.
Lentin has a keen awareness of the complexities of guilt and innocence, and is skilled in representing their interconnectedness. Personal emotion is handled more awkwardly throughout the novel, however, perhaps reflecting the emotional damage which the characters have inherited from their parents and from their culture.
It would be wrong to reveal the outcome of the plot, but it must be said that at the moment of climax, of confrontation and revelation, Lentin's writing is at its finest, despite, or perhaps because of her use of a fragmentary, disconnected narrative method, shifting viewpoints and tenses so that we are left in a new present, with the future undetermined, the past fractured and behind us.
One of the strengths of this novel is its awareness of the irony of the past as both justification for an ironic commentary on Israel as a State, "past victims turned occupiers", as Patricia puts it. Lentin demonstrates the ways in which the intransigence of extremists on both sides of a political divide mirror and reproduce each other. Nor is she afraid to draw parallels between the Middle Eastern conflict and our own. This awareness is especially chilling in light of recent developments, in Israel, in Lebanon, and in Ireland.
Overall, this is a well structured, absorbing novel, offering valuable insights into Middle Eastern politics, post Holocaust Jewish identity, and also into journalism as a profession, with its limitations, its cynicism, and its particular passion for understanding.
