#something she only started experimenting with in the 20th century - so *long* after her breakup with rio

[flutterytickles]

taking death out of the equation and just thinking of her as the green witch, i really like the idea of r/io being allergic to perfume

or, at least, some perfumes...

natural scents aren't a problem, but i think the harsh, man-made chemicals used in certain fragrances might be enough to set her off

for instance, the cheap, drugstore ones that always smell of straight alcohol - i imagine those bother her especially! it's the really artificial smell, i think

[normal-thoughts-official]

you talk a lot about magnus and camille dynamic and how they started and all that great meta content that you know i love but here's a question that idk if you ever got: how long do you think they were together? bc i can't think of a specific timeline and personally i love the one you talked abt at some point how she was pretty much right after asmododo or something like that, so he went from one type of abuse into another... but how long was he there? was camille with him for 20 years? 80? 130? any theories?

ugh that's a complicated one because i don't really have an answer for that and i think about it often as well

altho i think you got confused about her being right after asmodeus, i definitely don't think she was. i mentioned it my post about the timeline to say that magnus COULDN'T have been born close to the 1800s because that would make it asmodeus and camille way too close and that can't be the case because it would imply camille is basically the only person he dated before alec doajsdoaj and we know that's not true cuz there's also other ppl like george and etc. it was more a point in favor of "early to mid 1600s" for his birth date

anyway! let's go through this. i mentioned in another post that i think he got together with camille right after george, and that i think george died around the middle of the US civil war, which lasted from 1861 to 1865. so let's say they got together around 1863. now, we have a few pieces of information:

magnus mentioned that he hadn't been with anyone for "almost a century" when talking to alec. i know i think magnus is time blind but he can't be TOO off here. that was in 2016 so that would make their breakup date be a little after 1916 if magnus remembers correctly

literally the only thing about the timeline in that time period that i can remember is that one picture there was in his file of magnus surrounded by girls at a party, which looked to be in the 20s to me. since camille was an abusive asshole probably sabotaging his every chance to meet people, that couldn't have been when they were together. so i'd say 1920 is like, the limit for when they could have broken up. it's up to you whether or not you think magnus would be jumping into his party animal role immediately after the breakup or if it would take some time for him to heal; personally i think both make sense (i think she made a huge number on him so it would make sense for him to take a while to get back to that kind of thing; on the other hand, a lot of people turn straight to being party animals after breaking up abusive relationships, especially because for so long abusers have kept them from doing anything fun. so both work imo) so it's up to you

conclusion: they broke up in 1920 at the latest, so the max you could go for is 80 years, if you go with a timeline where camille was right after george (george can't be after camille because magnus has had no relationships after camille, but there could have been a bigger gap between george and camille than i personally hc). it could still be less tho, because we literally have NO information whatsoever on what happened between 1861 and 1920. even if you go with "they broke up and magnus immediately went full party animal" (which is perfectly valid), it's also entirely possible that this happened in say, 1901 and that pic just happened to be from the 20s, years later. but i also don't think it could have been a lot earlier than 1901 because magnus said almost a century, implying less than a century between the year they broke up and 2016. and while i do think that any immortal would lose track of time after a while and mingle years and decades together, nevermind adhd time blind icon magnus bane, if they had broken up in, say, 1880, magnus would remember that over a century has passed, if anything because so much has changed since then. so i think for him to say that the breakup should have happened in the 20th century at least

so that's the analysis from what we've seen in the show. personal opinion! i think 80 years makes sense, but is a bit much. it makes sense because there does seem to be a pretty obvious gap in magnus' file from the 1860s to the 1920s and then it goes back to having many pictures of him, and that "disappearance" makes sense in the context of him being in an abusive relationship (which limits your interactions and going outs by a lot). it does seem to be a bit much because magnus is at max 400, so, if they had been together 80 years, that would have been 20% of magnus' life spent with camille. or 1/5. added with all the time with asmodeus, it seems to be... a bit much dioadsoaijd and like look i'm not judging, i know abusive relationships can last many years and decades even for mortals, nevermind immortals, but i just don't like the idea of it lasting this long personally, especially because i think it makes him getting with alec seem actually a bit soon considering how long the abusive relationship lasted, and that's ignoring asmodeus' abuse on top of it

so personally, i like it morenif its around 40-50 years. i think it makes sense. it would mean the breakup was sometime around the 1910s, and while, okay, there is a gap in his file that seems to only end in the 20s, we must not forget an important fact: shadowhunters are stupid. so i actually think it makes sense that like, magnus emerges from his abusive relationship and is still getting back on his feet, and shadowhunters just don't care. like who is that guy? oh some warlock, no one's heard of him since like the 1860s lol. whatever happened to him? who cares. anyway, we love racism

and then around a decade later it turns out that magnus is healing enough to be a pain in their ass; say, that is when he becomes HWoB, or simply that they are reminded of how powerful magnus actually is once he is back in activity, and so they go back to like, investigating him and updating his file. so the file gap could be explained in that case. it also actually makes more sense that it would take shadowhunters a while to pay attention to him again, and since magnus was healing from an abusive relationship, the time it would take for him to draw their attention might well be around a decade

and with 40-50 years of an abusive relationship that would mean magnus has spent 10-12% of his life with camille; which is a LOT of time (for comparison: my first abusive relationship lasted a little over a year and i was 16 at the time; that makes it have lasted around 6% of my life at the time, and it did a HUGE number on me, taking me almost 3 years to have a relationship again), but not quite as much as a full 20%. not just that, but him taking "almost a century" (it would actually make it be a little over a century in this timeline, but again, magnus is immortal and time blind, so give him a break) to get with anyone again makes sense. that would be around double the time he's spent with her before he heals enough to be with someone else. that tracks, because abuse fucks you up fast and unfuckening yourself up takes longer. magnus isn't even fully unfucked up (which is okay, he doesn't have to be), but for him to be ready to take such huge steps as he is taking with alec, i think around double the time he's spent with her spent on healing makes sense

(again, i'm mostly going off my own experiences here; my abusive relationship lasted almost a year and a half, my next relationship was almost three years after the breakup. so almost perfectly double the time before i was ready to have another relationship. and again, i know recovery isn't the same for everyone and a lot of factors go into this, but i just think a timeline where he's been with her for 80 years and then gets with alec less than 100 afterwards is a bit too fast)

i still think 40 years is kind of a very long time to be in an abusive relationship and like holy shit i cant even imagine, but also i mean, mortals have abusive relationships that last that long and to an immortal itd feel like less time, and it does seem to be what best fits the timeline, so

and yeah i think those are my thoughts dadsajdsa

LAST MINUTE EDIT BEFORE THIS IS PUBLISHED CUZ IM NOT REDOING THE WHOLE THING: i got an anon today saying that magnus said something about not having seen camille in 130 years (link) which i didnt/dont really remember but i trust that theyre right and im wrong because i dont remember a lot of shit from this show. 130 years before 2016 would be 1886, meaning that if they broke up at that time and got together right after george's death as i personally hc, that's a 20-year relationship. that sounds like it fits the timeline as much as any other to me, and like i said in that ask, i think it makes sense that magnus would play it down to alec by saying "almost a century" instead of how long it's really been cuz it's a bit too vulnerable, and plus, we know one of the ways he protects himself is by not letting people pinpoint exactly some important dates from his past, particularly his birthday and etc

and okay i know that 20 years together, then 130 years recovering is a huge difference, but also i think with twenty years together as opposed to my comparatively short abusive relationship the scars of abuse would deepen a lot and quicker, so maybe it makes sense that it would take a longer time to feel confident enough to get to dating again. plus, like i said, there's no real math to be had in that process, everyone is different, has their own history and recovery process and etc so it's not like there is a deadline. so actually scratch everything i said above im going with this timeline. the one thing that doesn't track with that is the gap in his file but also like i said shadowhunters are stupid, so. yeah 20 years together is probably closer to it

in the end its kind of a relief cuz i was like "holy shit 40 years is so LONG" so... yeah udndidn

[georgeinbenin]

Epilogue

Nicole broke up with me on this hill overlooking Natitingou, four days into my six week trip to visit her there. It blindsided me and left me angry, jealous, depressed, and drunk. 

I arrived back in Seattle and was met by my Mom and Dad at the airport. Joining them with my Landcruiser was my friend Matt, who had sublet my apartment while I was away, making it possible for me to hold onto it. After a round of hugs I left with Matt and returned to my apartment, which was full of my friends. People from high school. People from college who moved from Maine to Seattle. People who I met in Seattle after college. 

I told stories out on the lawn behind the apartment, we shared the strangely more satisfying Senegalese Marlboros, and I was surrounded by people who liked me and who I was, something that had been lacking for six weeks. 

I was fucked up for a while about this breakup. Fortunately, before too long, I found a person who meant more to me than anybody before or since. Like the memories lingering, the drinking continued and though I was never a falling down drunk like at the funeral, I realized that it was not doing me any good or my family any good. I quit cold turkey. Coming up on six years now. One day at a time. 

I only ever talked to Nicole one more time. She returned from Benin a little earlier than she had planned; she made it to the end of her stint but did not stay any longer than necessary. All of her shit had been stuffed into the apartment’s closet, though I still used her boombox. She called me out of the blue, pissed that it had been a year since I had been back from Benin and had not mailed her shit to her. I explained that I had been unemployed because of needing the time off for the trip, that I had found a job in September (this being October when she contacted me) and only started to have a regular paycheck the month prior, and that she needed to pay me to ship her shit to New Jersey. I’m not proud of it, but I called her a bitch and hung up. And that was the end.

I literally dumped all her shit into a box, including the boombox. My girlfriend went above and beyond and accompanied me to the local shipping store where I got rid of Nicole forever.

Almost. I kept the stack of letters she wrote me from Benin. They were deeply personal. I read them as they arrived and re-read them and interpreted each word as if they might explain how this all fell apart. It was there, I just did not want to see it at the time.

I threw them away before I left Seattle to move east. 

This blog grew out of a challenge to approach the journal I kept while in Benin. I had not read it since 1998. A friend with whom I soon after forever fucked up our relationship challenged me to read it, to write about it, to tell the story that I had been tossing around in my head for years but was too afraid to approach. Reading the journal sent me into a three week long anxiety attack. I was really angry that I spent so much time on a person who would burn it all down like that. My wife explained to me that relationships all happen for a reason. 

I am glad that I finally revisited this story and told it. It was hard. It dredged up a lot of hard memories and feelings. But it reminded me of a lot of interesting and interested people I met in Benin. It has been twenty-two years since I met them. How many are still alive? Chabi-Kouma is not on Google Maps: it remains in the 20th century. This trip, my Forehead of Darkness, is forever part of my past. In telling my story I hope it helps me better face my future, unencumbered by the hurt and uplifted by the learning and experiences. 

Jed, master of the “Forehead of Darkness” mix tape, the best man at my wedding, and me in Seattle, summer 2019.

[newstfionline]

Despite the ‘Yuck Factor,’ Leeches Are Big in Russian Medicine

By Andrew E. Kramer, NY Times, April 29, 2017

MOSCOW--They are small as physician assistants go, about two inches long, and slithery. They wiggle about for a bit on Elena A. Kalinicheva’s back before getting down to what they do best: sucking blood.

Leeches--yes, leeches--are still widely prescribed in Russian medicine, about 10 million of them every year, in many cases as a low-cost substitute for blood thinners like warfarin.

“When you do it the first time, you think, ‘My God, leeches!’” Mrs. Kalinicheva said. “But after you go through it, you understand there is nothing to worry about.”

In Russia, a medicinal leech costs less than $1, and a typical application requires three to seven of the ravenous little creatures. Leech treatments, available throughout the country, take 30 to 40 minutes, though the resulting wounds ooze blood for an additional six hours or so until the natural anticoagulant in leech venom wears off.

Though Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin is muscling its way back onto the world stage militarily, economic development has lagged woefully, and that includes the medical system.

In developed countries, leech applications are often, and perhaps unfairly, associated with quackery, like the once popular practice of bleeding patients.

In fact, leeches are creeping back into Western medicine--as many as 6,000 are used annually in the United States, the BioTherapeutics, Education and Research Foundation estimates--but not for the same purposes as in Russia.

The Food and Drug Administration in the United States cleared the sale of leeches as medical devices in 2004--along with maggots--while European pharmaceutical companies have focused on isolating therapeutic, blood-thinning chemicals in the venom and delivering it in a less creepy manner.

“After the recession period of leech therapy, it has resurged after the mid-20th century with new applications in many medical fields,” a 2013 study published by the National Institutes of Health concluded.

The F.D.A. has approved leeches for draining blood, for example using them to remove excess blood from severed body parts that have been reattached.

In the Russian tradition, the therapeutic benefits are seen in the venom, a natural anticoagulant prescribed as a preventive treatment for stroke and heart disease, at a fraction of the cost of pharmaceutical blood thinners.

Russians are in theory covered for most doctor care and drugs under a socialized medical system written into the post-Soviet Constitution in 1993. Modernizing this state health care was a priority that Mr. Putin enshrined in decrees early in his third term as president. They set ambitious targets for medicine: Doctors’ salaries would double by 2018, the end of Mr. Putin’s term; life expectancy would rise by four years.

But the oil price collapse, sanctions and military spending intervened. Russia remains a poor country, albeit one with geopolitical ambitions. The average income in Russia is $642 a month, compared with $3,584 in the United States, according to government statistics in both countries.

“We need investment, and in medicine new technology requires state investment,” Yevgeny Gontmakher, an economist and authority on the Russian health care system, said in a telephone interview.

In rural areas, doctors are often too scarce to find in a timely manner. Russian life expectancy for men and women, at 70.3 years, has hardly budged since Mr. Putin issued his decrees and is still 10 years lower than the European Union average of 80 years.

Similarly, while government-approved “vitally necessary” drugs are theoretically covered, in practice they are as likely as not to be out of stock at the state-run pharmacies that distribute them free. Left to pay out of pocket at clinics or commercial drugstores, patients gravitate toward cheaper options, like leeches.

Ms. Kalinicheva, a secretary in a Moscow office, said she had suffered from intolerable lower back pain before trying leeches, applied weekly at a walk-in medical center, the Hirudotherapy Clinic.

She said she had chosen leeches for cost savings and to avoid taking painkillers. “I wanted something natural, to minimize the chemicals,” Ms. Kalinicheva said.

At the clinic, Dr. Irina A. Pankova applies leeches to treat glaucoma, prostatitis, hypertension and many more ailments. She encourages patients to use them in conjunction with standard drug treatments. As they engorge themselves with blood, the leeches bulge to six to seven times their original size before dropping off. They are used only once, to avoid spreading disease.

On a recent day, a steady stream of patients traipsed through the door, took seats and flipped through magazines, awaiting their turn.

Medicinal leeches cost 90 cents each in Russia, compared with $15.50 for leeches sold by Leeches USA, a medicinal leech supplier based in Westbury, N.Y.

They are raised in leech farms where, in Russia, women in white laboratory coats follow a procedure little changed over the decades.

They set out glass jars teeming with medical leeches, or Hirudo medicinalis; a colander with a fine, porous surface; a bolt of cheesecloth; and a jug of fresh cow’s blood.

“The leeches are hungry,” Natasha Bogdanova, an employee of the International Center for Medicinal Leeches, observed as she ladled warm blood into the cloth-lined colander.

It is not a job for the squeamish. At feeding time, the “leech raisers,” as they are called, plunge their hands into the glass bottles of leeches, retrieve the little bloodsuckers and put them in the blood-filled colanders.

“I’m not afraid,” Ms. Bogdanova said with a shrug. “I’m used to it. It’s my job. A job is a job.” One leech slithered up her wrist as she spoke.

Like researchers in richer countries, scientists in the Soviet Union were trying to transform live leech therapy into pharmaceutical products in the late 1980s, said Gennady I. Nikonov, the director of the leech farm, who got his start in a laboratory at Moscow State University trying to isolate medicinal compounds from leeches.

The effort unraveled with the Soviet breakup and is still foundering for lack of money. Mr. Nikonov has continued the work, and his company has prospective pharmaceutical products but, like so many other areas of Russian industry, lacks investment to bring them to market. That would require expensive clinical trials.

And so for now the leeches are sold, squirming and hungry, in glass canning jars, waiting for their patients. It works, as it has for centuries. “Why give up the experience of past years?” Mr. Nikonov said, shrugging.

Mr. Nikonov estimated that Russian leech farms produce 10 million specimens a year; his farm alone accounts for about two million. The F.D.A. does not keep statistics on American leech use, a spokeswoman, Stephanie Caccomo, said, but the numbers are small.

Most American patients “would prefer a pill or something else without the yuck factor,” said Dr. Ronald Sherman, a former professor of medicine at the University of California, Irvine, and director of the BioTherapeutics, Education and Research Foundation.

[how2to18]

IT’S RARE TO FIND a first book as accomplished and original, not to mention droll, as Laura Esther Wolfson’s collection of personal essays, For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors. Yes, the peculiar title does have a raison d’être, as do all of the allusions and offhand surprises Wolfson treats us to. The entire volume is a loosely woven tapestry, its brilliantly colored strands of experience threading through, appearing and disappearing. It becomes the tableau of a life — until, in this case, middle age: Wolfson’s work as a Russian and French interpreter and translator (two very different endeavors); her professional travels; her two failed marriages and regret over being childless; her disabling lung disease; her discovery that being Jewish means more than a taste for good bread. And all these strands impinge on one another.

A more conventional mind might have organized the contents as a linear memoir, sauntering through Wolfson’s early publications in college (reviews of dance performances in an upstate New York paper after renouncing a career as a dancer), to her discovery of Russian and her long stay in Soviet Georgia, and so on and so on. Instead we find a far more shapely and entertaining work, imitating the way life happens and is recalled: in luminous fragments, echoing and prismatic.

This book, which won the 2017 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction, is Wolfson’s first, but she is no newcomer to the world of letters. She has published stories and essays in literary magazines and been included in distinguished anthologies. But above all, she has dwelt on and in the Russian language, interpreting for “statesmen and scoundrels who were not infrequently one and the same.” Early on, when she could jet around, she dealt with “[s]tate banquets at the Kremlin, mafia trials, forgotten literary masterpieces, KGB files declassified under Yeltsin (later to be reclassified under Putin).” And she translated a book “on Russian obscenities and criminal slang, with the rhyming ditties.”

Later, when her illness required a more stable life, she took a job at what she coyly describes as “a tall building of green glass at midtown Manhattan’s watery eastern edge.” One needn’t be a world traveler to recognize the United Nations, where she rendered “routine staff correspondence, treaties, and reports” from French as well as Russian. She is wisely reluctant to name names when it comes to the realm of diplomacy, and she is just as reluctant to do so when discussing the alleged working methods of “a well-known two-person team (American husband, Russian wife) […] who retranslated most of Russian literature.” These are of course Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose procedure, to our author, “sounds an awful lot like the way generations of schoolboys got through Latin and Greek by relying on a ‘trot.’ […] This couple can do over, yes, but can they simply do?”

The reference to the above couple appears in one of the more rueful essays, “Losing the Nobel.” She was offered the opportunity to translate two works by Svetlana Alexievich, the celebrated Belarussian compiler of 20th-century Soviet oral histories chronicling World War II, the war in Afghanistan, and the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl. “Novels in voices,” Alexievich calls them. The two had already met when Wolfson served as Alexievich’s interpreter at the 2005 PEN World Voices Festival in New York City and found herself euphoric about the latter’s extraordinary work. Alexievich must have been impressed as well, because she kept in touch and soon after gave Wolfson’s name to her agent. In spite of her boundless admiration, Wolfson declined the offer. She was not in good health. She had a full-time job she needed, partly for her medical expenses. “I chose my writing over hers — isn’t this what creative people are supposed to do, sacrificing whatever they must so as to clear space for their work? […] I had to live another ten years to find out exactly what I passed up.” She’s referring, of course, to Alexievich’s 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The taste of rue flavors many of the essays: a wry, philosophical wonder at the turns life takes, at how we conspire with circumstances to make the wrong choices — which always seem right at the time and may indeed be right for a while. Wolfson’s first husband, Aleksandr, seemed very right, as did his family, who lived in the “hinterlands” of Soviet Georgia. His mother treated Wolfson like a daughter and stayed in touch long after the young couple had moved to the United States and separated. The marriage seems to have foundered for several reasons, not least of them language, which paradoxically bound them closer and maintained a certain divide. “We discovered that in the US, marriage conducted in a foreign language afforded certain advantages: we could stand at a shop counter discussing a prospective purchase without the vendor listening in and engage publicly in secret exchanges of all kinds.” But Wolfson suspects that her use of the Russian word for “garbage” to describe the broken electronic devices her husband retrieves from the street and fixes played a significant role in their breakup. Surely more significant than linguistic or cultural differences was the fact that during a half-dozen or more years of married life, Aleksandr was never quite “ready” to have the child Laura wanted so much.

Ironically, while Laura can’t wait to have a child, she assists her Russian sister-in-law, Julia, in the opposite effort. Given the scarcity of certain personal hygiene products in Georgia, Julia pleads with Laura to leave her used diaphragm as a parting token. “‘I’ll boil it in the big soup pot,’ Julia said, with a nod toward the kitchen, ‘to sterilize it.’ […] To refuse her request would be mean-spirited.” Years later, after her own divorce, Laura learns that her gift had been effective.

In her second marriage, readiness is no longer an issue: her lung disease would make pregnancy life-threatening. As she waited in a schoolyard to pick up her sister’s small boy, another child’s father gradually approached her and uttered a very 21st-century pick-up line: “Whose mom are you?”

Wolfson can infuse the most ordinary occasions of daily life with a startling poignancy, such as the above, or, through her vivid imagery, lift casual facts out of the banal. As a young woman exploring Paris she notes a house in Montmartre where the composer Erik Satie once lived and kept two pianos, “one on top of the other, giving new meaning to the word ‘upright,’ although in my mind’s eye, the one on top is, in fact, upside down, pedals waving gently overhead like the fronds of some giant houseplant.” Even a daily subway ride can be transformed: “The commute is a golden border at the beginning and end of each workday that sheds some of its shimmer onto the leaden expanse in between.” The magic happens because she reads and annotates a few pages of Proust, “the minute perceptions captured and sliced lengthwise to reveal their delicate innards and seeds,” during her daily trek to the UN.

Occasionally Wolfson’s choices turn out to be absolutely right; witness her pursuit of writing despite the difficulties it presents. Writing is not easy for anyone, but Wolfson’s health demands a protocol that with her ubiquitous wit she manages to make funny as well as daunting. The title “Dark Green and Velvety, with a Dusting of Cat Fur,” refers to her couch. “[H]ere I am back on the couch. Not the psychotherapeutic couch. Not the casting couch. The writing couch […] [m]y writing process now involves a great deal of sleeping.” Her seven-syllable lung condition makes it impossible to write “for more than an hour and a half without pausing for a nap. In fact,” she confides, “half an hour of shut-eye intervened between the end of the previous paragraph and the beginning of this one.”

Before she starts she places the essentials beside her on the couch: notes, books, tissues, ChapStick, flash drive, glass of water, et cetera. The great Italo Calvino felt the same way about reading. In his novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, he gives instructions for settling down with a book:

Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat […] Stretch your legs, go ahead and put your feet on a cushion, […] on the desk, on the piano […] Take your shoes off first […] Adjust the light so you won’t strain your eyes […] Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.

But writing is more demanding, as Wolfson attests: “I open the computer and off I go: write, sleep, write, sleep, write. This is the ideal sequence: three stints of writing intercut with two of sleep. It adds up to some four or five hours of writing, spread out over six or seven hours total.”

Another essay tinged with faint regret describes her realization, in a very secular household, that she is a Jew. The only indication of this in her childhood is bread. Every so often her family visits an old bakery in Syracuse’s former Jewish neighborhood, now mostly empty lots, and comes away with delectable smelling bags of bagels, bialys, challahs — far superior to the Wonder Bread of her schoolmates’ lunchbox sandwiches. “Bread, I sensed, was a surface manifestation of something deeper, a difference that remained impossible to grasp […] Apart from bread, what were the other signs that we were Jewish?”

Not until years later does she begin to seek answers, prompted by her living next door to a small brick building on New York City’s Upper West Side, where on certain nights well-dressed people gathered. Clearly a synagogue. Her interest piqued, she begins reading about and studying Judaism, even taking a course in Yiddish, which, oddly enough, given her talent for languages, she never masters to her satisfaction. She reads not only the Torah, but also the works of major Jewish-American novelists. Still, as with marriage, it doesn’t totally work. She never quite feels “at home in a Jewish house of prayer […] at home in the house of Judaism.”

But her studies lead to a friendship with a much older Jewish woman whose story is set against the violent upheavals of life in the USSR. Which in turn leads to a Russian émigré writer in Chicago, who in turn has a story of a Lithuanian. The ramifications go on in shaggy-dog style, deepening and widening, with no end in sight. When the end does come, it turns out to be a Russian memoir that needs a translator. This is hardly the first such occasion. Story piles on story as Wolfson moves along, connecting with anyone Russian who comes her way: cabdrivers, a masseuse, most with a tale or a potential book.

In the final essay, “Other Incidents in the Precinct,” she ponders, with the lightest of touches, her lack of success at marriage — why, what does it mean, should she even consider it again? She begins apparently far afield, yet close to the bone, as it were: “That spring, I went to my fourth dentist in three years. Why did I change dentists so frequently and so frivolously? My formative years gave no indication that I would engage in such behavior.” She can find no answers, but since her chosen form is the essay, questions need not have answers. They need only to take us down a beckoning narrative path — which includes her departure from her second husband, attended by the police, as well as her discovery of her father’s first marriage, before coming full circle to end in the dentist’s office.

Laura Esther Wolfson may not have managed to get all she wants, but she’s succeeded triumphantly in her passion to write. She has lived richly in two cultures and cultivated a sensibility informed by all that came her way. Her book is a response to her choices among life’s offerings. “My experience,” she writes, “though regrettably vaster than that of most people, is still meager as a basis for generalization […] Still, I will draw some conclusions, because what else can I do with these experiences now?”

¤

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the author of the novels Disturbances in the Field, Leaving Brooklyn, the memoir Ruined by Reading, and many other works of fiction and non-fiction. Her third collection of poetry, No Way Out But Through, was published in 2017 by the University of Pittsburgh Press Poetry Series.

The post “The Way Life Happens”: On Laura Esther Wolfson’s “For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2IDt0I6 via IFTTT