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A rare and outstanding jewel, | By | Pastry chick (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews |
Earth and High Heaven is also a gem. Graham tackles a social unmentionable: the possible mixed marriage of a Jew and a Gentile. Interestingly, this book takes place DURING WWII, while Canadians and the rest of Europe were fighting against Hitler and Nazi Germany. At the heart of the novel are two people, Erica Drake and Marc Reiser. Erica is from a wealthy family who has seen their wealth slip a bit during the Depression, but they still cling to their WASPy status wholeheartedly(at least her parents do). Marc Reiser is a Canadian Jew, born to Austrian immigrant parents, who practices law in Montreal. Erica and Marc meet at a party at her parents' posh Westmount home, and you could pretty much say it was love at first sight. But, what ensues is a battle for that love as Erica's parents fight wholeheartedly against the relationship, because to them marrying a Jew is pretty much the worst thing in the world, at least they claim it will be for her, since her social status will diminish and after all, this man is only "using" her to get ahead. The love that Marc and Erica share grows despite all of this though, and even despite Marc misgivings that HE will ruin Erica's life with the prejudice she will face with a mixed marriage. Questions arise like "How would they raise their kids?" and the fact that Erica's father wouldn't be able to have his son-in-law come to his club(something that matters to him a great deal, to Erica not so much). What lies at the heart of this novel is prejudice and how blinding that prejudice in the face of stubbornness it can become. Erica's father is already not too pleased by his son's marriage to a Catholic French Canadian, this, especially given the fact that Erica is his favorite child is too much. It takes the second generation, both Marc's brother and Erica's sister to show parents some sense(though Marc's parents seem more amenable to the idea; Marc's mother's only worry is that when people are married for a long time they can fight and say things they wouldn't say to anyone else. She's afraid that Erica would throw Marc's being a Jew back at him). This, to an extent can be applied to any situation involving prejudices towards something someone doesn't or can't(because of lack of desire)understand. I know that when I began dating Keren, my mother got extremely worried. This is a woman for whom Christmas is a literal explosion all over her property every single year. The fact that I would possibly never celebrate Christmas again bothered her terribly. I still don't think she's completely over it, but at least she's willing to work with it and is not trying to prevent the relationship from continuing like Erica's father, especially, tries to do. Erica's father feels he knows what's best for her, but of course the only one that knows what's best for her is her, and he doesn't get it at all...Some phenomenal quotes come out of this book: "That human beings, regardless of their own merit, should take upon themselves the right to judge a whole group of men, women and children, arbitrarily assembled according to a largely meaningless set of definitions, was evil enough; that there should not even be a judgement, was intolerable" (Graham 32).
And in reference to Erica's father: "What he was saying was of no importance in itself, it had all been said before so many times, repeated parrot-like but with an air of acute perception and originality by one person after another, in one country after another, all the way down through history. After all, even Hitler was unable to think up anything really new on the subject of the Jews; he merely said what everybody else had been saying, only of course he said it louder and oftener, and put it a bit more strongly.[paragraph break] The importance lay, first, in the fact that it was Charles who was saying it, and second, in the fact that if he believed what he said, if he believed that even half of what he was saying applied to Marc, then, whether or not her father ultimately came round, it would make no real difference. He might put up with Marc, he might even endure him for her sake, but he would never like him. He would never even get near enough to Marc to find out whether he was likable or not. [paragraph break] (and MY FAVORITE PART RIGHT HERE) You might just as well try to see a man through a brick wall as try to see him through a mass of preconceived ideas" (149).
What I particularly loved was the foresight that Graham's characters had towards AMERICAN government. something that seems particularly fitting seeing as we are in an Election year moving towards FINALLY electing a new President. "'Do you think the people who are in a position to do all the talking really know?' asked Erica. [paragraph break] 'Maybe a few of them do, but all we seem to have got so far is a kind of mass consciousness of the way things are changing or ought to change, if we're really going to get anywhere after the war. At least the English masses seem to be getting the hang of things, and I guess we are too, though naturally not to the same extent yet, because we haven't taken anything like the beating they have. I don't know about the Americans, though I'd be willing to bet that when capitalism is a dead duck in the rest of the world, the Americans will be the last nation to admit it.' 'Why?' asked Erica. 'Because their attitude toward Government seems to be fundamentally different than ours. The further you get from unrestricted capitalism the more Government you have to have. So far as the war is concerned, for example, the Americans apparently get production in spite of their Government, half the time, and not because of it. It's their individual industrial geniuses who work the miracles, not Washington. They still believe in rugged individualism and don't believe in 'government interference,' so rugged individualism works and Government doesn't. Most of the Americans I know talk about their Government as though it was on one side of the fence and they were on the other. Good old-fashioned capitalism is the only economic system that suits that point of view'" (157-8). Hmmmm....
The novel gets its title, one discovers, from The Shropshire Lad by A.E. Houseman, which contains the lines 'Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle.../Earth and high heaven are fixed of old and founded strong.' That makes me think of today even, that in some regards things haven't changed, or at least not as much as we would like. My mother worried about me dating a Jew, but not as much as she worries about what our lives are like as being a lesbian couple. There is an entire part of the country(ultra-conservatives)that are afraid, much like Erica's parents in the novel are, of people who are different, and there are also a lot of people who claim to be enlightened, but when push comes to shove...
"When I was just a little girl" I wanted to be Jewish so bad. I thought it was cool, that it would make me different. This book made me think about how hard it must have been, to preserve one's faith and culture in the face of sooooo much adversity. One night while I was reading the book I asked Keren about whether sometimes it had been hard for her to be Jewish in this country. Her answer made me think. Have we really come that far as a nation, as a world? This impending election has raised a lot of those questions, since the democrats have either a white woman or a black man as possible nominees. How ready are we really, and are our preconceived notions like the wall that stretches across China, or like the one in the former East Berlin? GGs-35. PPs-36.
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