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Sarah/Sara
By Jacob Paul
Reviewed by Laura Ellen Scott
Ig Publishing, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-935439-13-4
Paperback; 251 pp; $15.95
Less than halfway through Sarah/Sara, Jacob Paul’s epistolary novel about a young woman kayaking solo along the Alaskan coast, narrator Sarah Frankel is asked the most immature and honest question possible:
—but do you ever wonder what would have happened with your parents if you hadn’t become so Jewish?
Sarah will never answer that question on its own terms because to do so means to unravel her sole remaining commitment. Her conversion to orthodoxy is heartbreaking to her skeptical mother, and confusing to her father, an investment banker who was in Tower One on 9/11. Deeply haunted, he has only one wish for the future: to kayak the Arctic in a boat he has made with his own hands. But when Sarah’s parents visit her in Israel where she has become “Sara,” they are killed in a suicide bomb attack in the café below Sarah’s apartment. Disfigured in the same attack, Sarah pays tribute to her father by appropriating his dream. The intense tragedies Sarah has endured are among the first she ever experiences, and in response to tests of faith she cannot control—such as acts of terrorism—Sarah engineers her own impossible tests. She finishes the kayak and embarks on a six-week paddle from Prudhoe Bay to the McKenzie River.
Sarah/Sara explores faith—Sarah’s faith, relatively new and closely guarded. Her kayak journey is soulful but narcissistic, and throughout, Sarah keeps a journal to track her days and ruminate on her limited, tragic past. It takes a while for Paul to establish the bones of a very difficult back story, but once he does, the narrator’s transition from past to present is deft and natural, especially as the story accepts its essence as an adventure tale:
The seal and the birds, the beautiful shoreline backdropped by stacked rows of mountain are always there, every day. But yesterday morning they were beautiful instead of threatening.
I’ll tell you what felt most divine: wishing my father was here and not having a complete breakdown. Well at least not having a breakdown right away . . .
Then I saw the polar bear.
Reason stands against this being the same bear as I think followed me earlier in this trip, but in my heart I believe it is. I looked back every few minutes to anticipate, and judge the severity of the encroaching storm clouds. On one of these surveys, I caught with my peripheral vision, a flash of white. My instincts immediately screamed, bear. . . Cyclical breathing, Sarah, in through the nose, out through the nose.
The journaling narrator regularly refers to herself as “Sarah” in the sections where she describes her Alaskan journey, a habit easily interpreted as a fusion of her father’s voice with hers as a daughter. Paul’s management of voice is a marvel, and the limitations are as frustrating as they are dramatic. Sarah’s righteousness means she can’t provide a genuine portrait of her fiercely secular mother. Sarah’s mother is terrified of how her daughter has changed, but Sarah cannot yield any ground. Here is Sarah’s mother, arguing from the heart against the teachings of Sarah’s mentor:
“They deserved it? That motherf----r said that my grandparents deserved to be yanked out of their tiny Czech ghetto, out of their shtetl shul, and taken out in the woods where they dug their own graves?”
Rather than respond to her mother’s pain with kindness that might calm the situation, Sarah is willfully insensitive and patronizing:
“. . . all Jews are interconnected and responsible for each other, and if the Jew in Russia . . .says Tehillim without kovanah, then there’s much less righteousness in the world, and then the Jew in Germany will break Shabbos, the Jew in France eat pork, the Jew in America intermarry.”
That time, she hung up on me, but only after first repeatedly banging the receiver against something hard, the kitchen countertop, maybe.
These early passages are among the most risky. Paul almost loses us, except for the tenderness that Sarah shows for her father. She is closer to him, less competitive. They kayak together. Still, her youthful arrogance muscles through, even as he describes his volunteer work at Ground Zero:
He didn’t mean to call me by my Hebrew name, but exhaustion and fume induced laryngitis did for me what he wouldn’t have thought to do, to flatten the A, roll the R, shift emphasis to the second syllable.
“Sara, I’m haunted by what I’ve asked to see. These are the pillars of smoke Laban’s wife turned into when she looked back at Sodom.” I didn’t correct him. I didn’t tell him that it was Lott not Lavan, and certainly not Laban, and that his wife became a pillar of salt not smoke.
While recording her Arctic journey and remembering the past, there is a third tale being told. Sarah is also writing the story of herself as post-Alaska-Sara, in Israel again where she is an ultra orthodox woman who enjoys rich relationships of mind and faith with imaginary friends. It doesn’t take long for Sarah’s fantasies of Sara to drift off point. She creates mournful, 42-year-old Udi, who has lost his son and recognizes young Sara as a soul mate. The fantasy entries sometimes sound like romance novel stuff; Udi has fascinating hands and impressive chest hair, poignant details that tell us all Sarah really knows of men’s bodies comes from closeness to her father. For the most part, cool Sara keeps the desirous, presumptuous Udi at bay. When he notes that custom requires him to wait a year after his son’s death to marry her, Sara says:
“. . . I told you I don’t believe in love.”
“Don’t believe in love?”
“In romantic love. In the way that you mean love. I don’t believe in that desperate, Western construct metastasized only in its ending, measured by the hurt its loss leaves. No thank you. Not for me.”
But Udi counters:
“I need touch.”
At which point Sara will carefully reach out and take Udi’s hand. She will squeeze it between her palms. His skin will be tough and warm, the veins crossing his finger bones will gently compress against her palms; his nails will scratch along the undersides of her fingers lightly, and shoot tingles through the hackles on the back of her neck. Sara will sniffle and break away from him, stand up. She’ll tell him she cares for him but just can’t, can’t go through what it would mean to be with anyone who hadn’t come to grips with her disfigurement objectively, through the cold, premeditated calculations of shituch.
Shituch is arranged matchmaking, an unnecessary step in Udi’s view. But the steps are everything to Sara, who knows that strength comes from discipline—discipline that Sarah fears she is losing in Alaska. Soon after the journey begins, she starts to neglect her prayers and observations. Her grief collides with her PTSD, resulting in paranoia that won’t be tamed by the bottle of Macallan that she tries to discard. She loses the sense of her location, missing a whole settlement while searching for another that no longer exists, and eventually she becomes stranded by a bad turn of weather. Forced to make camp and worried that the onset of her period makes her more vulnerable to predators, Sarah writes of a day in when Sara’s paranoia of suicide bombers is so overwhelming that she calls on Udi for emotional rescue. In seeking his comfort, she cannot stop herself from giving in to physical desire:
She will pull her arm away from him, ghost tingles mesmerizing its flesh, betraying her will. His hangdog face and submissive, sympathetic willingness will drive her to a near internal fury and a strong desire to grab his shadowed cheeks in both hands and kiss him, hard, her nails biting into his skin, leaving marks, her teeth driving against his lips, mashing them, making them swell purple, like plum’s skin. She will want to hit him.
“I’m afraid Udi, I’m afraid.”
“I know, Sara.”
“I’m afraid because there’s this girl in the Arctic and the ice has closed in around her and she’s trapped in her tent and she can’t move and winter is coming.”
Future Sara has lived through what Alaskan Sarah may not. Lost, unable to paddle, and her provisions ransacked by scavenging animals, Sarah’s ritual devotions give way to survival. Whereas she once wrote:
You can never know anything, it turns out. Faith. Faith, faith, faith, faith, faith.
Now she writes,
This is a push to push as far as I can push.
Both are declarations to keep herself moving. The breath and rhythm is obvious. Same function, different perspectives.
Ultimately, is faith what Sarah imagines? Jacob Paul doesn’t answer that question, choosing instead to prioritize Sarah’s physical struggle and analytical prowess in the last pages. While it is obvious to talk about Sarah/Sara as a discussion of faith, the theme of youthful identity is just as important. The final act of Sarah/Sara is a return to and intensification of the core adventure as it rises to a finality that includes one particular surprise: we have come to respect Sarah and to treasure her strength of will. Through a compressed maturation process involving tragedy and contest, Sarah Frankel’s hubris has evolved into sharp, focused wisdom.
Visit Jacob Paul’s Sarah/Sara page here.
Visit Ig Publishing on the web at http://www.igpub.com/
Laura Ellen Scott teaches fiction writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Her short fiction has been selected for Wigleaf’s Top Fifty, Short Story Month, Eclectica Best Fiction, Gravity Dancers: More Fiction by Washington Area Women, and Barellhouse’s “Futures.” She was nominated twice for Dzanc’s Best of the Web and has made the StorySouth Million Writers notable stories list three times. Most of her published work is linked at her blog, Probably just a story. Laura is also the curator of VIPs on vsf, where editors and writers of very short fiction express very brief thoughts on form and craft.
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