Naked Inhibition

By SUSAN COMNINOS

PORTRAIT OF MY MOTHER, WHO POSED NUDE IN WARTIME
By Marjorie Sandor
200 pages. Sarabande Books. $13.95.

Women in Marjorie Sandor’s new short story collection make of their desire what non-violinists might of a Stradivarius they inherit. Occasionally, they test bow against string and produce a quavery sound. But mainly, they leave it in its case and keep the lid on it.

So expect gaps between fleshly scenes in this book. Its provocative title notwithstanding, Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime does not give us a Jewish heroine who wrests her pleasure from the corporeal, daily and despite Hitler.

What it serves up are 10 tales, featuring three women in an American family: Eva, her daughter Clara, and Clara’s daughter, Rachel, the book’s narrator. Eva, the daughter of immigrants, fears the power of amour and raised Clara to do the same. Rachel operates as the ear into which they spill the secrets of their thwarted lives.

Hardly a feminist read, one might think. But Sandor’s deft stories, set in the 1920s through the present, are indeed enlightened and a serious exploration of inheritance. With them, she spurs her readers to consider how to cherish ties to maternal forbears, yet not be undone by their fears.

Portrait begins with a cautionary tale from Grandma Eva. An ancestress—she tells Rachel in the story “Legend”—widowed after an arranged marriage, left her three young sons for a lover. Her punishment? To be struck from the family bible, her name made ineffable. Yet, despite this outcome, Rachel says, Eva’s “eyes were wide, her voice hushed and missing its usual sharpness, and so in the end I got the wrong picture.”

Rachel sees not a renegade mother, but a stunned bride who had through “no will of her own borne three sons before her twentieth birthday—and who now, only now, escaped them all in a cloud of black lace.” Eva tags her tale, Rachel says, with an editorial: “It was abandonment, pure and simple, and she hoped I was paying attention. Was I?”

Rachel is listening to Eva, but with an ear tuned also to the frequencies of Southern California, where she is growing up in comfort, the daughter of a physician, far from the cruelties of the old country, the anxieties of the Depression and the upheaval of WWII.

Still, Eva’s tales fascinate Rachel—in part because they were withheld from her own mother, Clara, during her 1930s youth.

Clara’s childhood is marked by mystery, as her parents, Eva and Jake, give his European past the silent treatment. Tales of Continental fare—ghettos, Cossacks, and famine—are off the menu. "Enough ugliness,” Eva always said. “Why would we burden a child?”

Eva, ever protective, exerts herself further on Clara’s behalf, working to rid the girl of her notions of romance, while stinting her on facts about other adult afflictions, like Jake’s diabetes, and sex.

Caution dictates even the selection of Clara’s piano instructor, Rachel says in the story “Elegy for Miss Beagle”: “From such a name as this, Grandmother Eva got what she could: that this teacher was local, plain, had never had a love affair or a year at the Sorbonne—nothing to give a young girl ideas.”

As Rachel tells it, Eva’s prowess in caution “was legendary. ‘It’s nothing, just an instinct,’ she used to say to us. ‘Down it comes, straight through the generations without a hitch, until we get to your mother.’” Eva’s voice, at its best, will sound familiar to readers of Jewish fiction. Caustic, economical, distinctive: it is a voice for a Grace Paley character, just one not having fun.

Yet—vital to Sandor’s book—Eva’s instinct to shield her daughter fails. Clara indulges heavily in youthful fantasy and becomes an adult who bases decisions on wispy notions and impulse, leading her to marry the wrong man, Abe, in the years of WWII.

Eva, in the book’s title story, covertly admits defeat. She sends Clara off to meet a refugee painter, Lev, and his dying wife, Manya. While the visit is framed as a good deed, it creates an opportunity for a dalliance, as Eva must have known it would: Abe is away in the service, and Clara, slightly pregnant with Rachel, has nothing to lose.

Some aspects of Portrait are hard to swallow, like Eva’s reason to reveal the family scandal. Similarly, her granddaughter’s ubiquity in these tales can feel contrived—as when a teenage Rachel tags along on her brother’s dates to act as his lookout (even for fiction, this is unreal), or an adult Rachel gets a visit from her dead father, who wants to tender his romantic secret.

Still, if Portrait strikes a few sour notes, it gives us 10 well-scored tales that lyrically explore the ties between a family’s generations. Its overarching theme of mothers and daughters is one Sandor treated in her 1999 book of essays, The Night Gardener: A Search for Home. That she reprises the theme, here, suggests she may want to give it the attention it deserves for some time. So should we.