Uriel Through Eleanor a Historical Military Fiction by Brian Prousky Book Tour with Guest Post and Giveaway

 

 Unlike any memoir you've ever read. 

As absurd as it is devastating. 

A literal tug of war between competing and compelling versions of the truth.

Uriel Through Eleanor

by Brian Prousky

Genre: Historical Fiction

 Uriel “Uri” Katz, World War Two veteran, concentration camp liberator, devout atheist, contrarian, cynic and lifelong bachelor, places an ad in a newspaper seeking a “typist” to assist him in writing his memoir and receives only one reply, from a woman, named Eleanor, who negotiates a deal with him that includes room and board.

Within days of her arrival, Eleanor begins inserting herself into Uri’s story. So much so that she eventually becomes one of its main characters. And while Uri is dismayed and, at times, exasperated by this turn of events, he’s also grown accustomed to Eleanor’s company and cooking, and, as such, begrudgingly puts up with the semi-appropriation of his memoir.

Though what remains imperceptible to Uri—until the novel’s final, thrilling pages—is that Eleanor's appearance in his life wasn't coincidental; it was manufactured by her. And that the two have been intricately linked since the day he marched into the concentration camp.

Brian Prousky’s dazzling new book is memoir-writing turned on its head. It’s a story about storytelling itself. About the power of language to shape and misshape history. And about the equal perils of sharing and not sharing deep-held secrets.

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There was a lot that was odd about my childhood. Which is just another way of saying there was a lot that was odd about the person who raised me. Though nothing more so than how often she uprooted our lives. We moved twice when I was an infant and toddler, to different cities inside Switzerland. My earliest memories, however, are of living in Lisbon. Why we ended up there, I couldn’t say. It wasn’t part of what my mother shared with me when she was dying. And I wasn’t going to interrupt her with any questions. I understood she was sharing the whole of what she wanted, or needed, me to hear. The rest was easy conjecture. Especially for a psychiatrist like me.

We didn’t have any relatives or friends that drew us to Lisbon. Nor to any of the cities that followed. With one exception—the last one. Until then, however, we were on our own. Of which I was repeatedly, abundantly aware. Until, in each new city, I made friends with schoolmates, some of whom came over to play with me, in whatever apartment we lived in at the time. A few even joined us for dinner and slept over. My mother, who went out of her way not to make friends, again with one exception, had at least a rudimentary understanding of the unhealthiness of a childhood without normal peer interactions, how lastingly weird-making it potentially was. 

What she didn’t have was a rudimentary understanding of the unhealthiness of tearing children away from their friends.

Eight different times.

It’s a wonder she didn’t have a second weird adult to contend with.

What I remember about Lisbon isn’t much. Steep hills. Narrow Streets. Leprous buildings. Water I wasn’t allowed to go near. And tiles—tiles that, through my six-year-old eyes, appeared to cover everything, as if the city once tried to entomb itself in them and then lost all interest, including in repairing the ones that had cracked or in replacing the ones that had broken off. I don’t recall walking into a building, or on a surface, that wasn’t tiled. Fully or spottily. For my mother, like every other landscape we occupied, this one was nothing but treachery. Especially when it rained. And the tiles that were already slippery and waiting to claim our lives in a disastrous fall, were now aggressively trying to take us down. It was then that she squeezed my hand so tightly it ached and, with her other hand, held on to whatever support the city had to offer, and took steps that were so small and slow that old people with canes flew past us.

I was too young to feel embarrassed by her behaviour. But not too young to have a sense that she was different than other adults. And that her difference was striking. And that what made it striking, which I can obviously better grasp and describe now, was the extent of her vigilance. Which far exceeded typical instinctual maternal protectiveness. And was situated somewhere in the furthest reaches of that continuum where the atypical, hyper-vigilant acted on, or reacted to, their fears.

We moved around so often because it took so little to convince her to move around. Peril was always her reason. Except that, increasingly, I knew there was none. Except in the peril-mill that churned inside her. We had drawers but lived mostly out of suitcases hidden in our closets. They had to be packed up with all our essential belongings at all times. I thought of them as libraries we borrowed from, and returned things to. We left Lisbon after a man, who was probably drunk, attempted to fit his key in our lock and, when that didn’t work, knocked on our door. It was likely he lived on another floor of our building. My mother ignored him at first. Until his knocking turned to pounding and screaming to be let in. She yelled back at him, from behind the door she wasn’t going to open, that he should go away, that he had the wrong apartment. Her Portuguese was poor like mine. Which is when he stopped pounding and yelling and said, “Frieda? Senhorita Ulmer? What are you doing in my home?” I asked her how he knew her full name and she put her finger on her lips and said, “Shhhhhh,” and pushed me toward the far end of the room. She turned back toward the door and repeated my question to him. “It’s Emanuel. From the pastelaria.”

My mother was lucky to have found work in a Jewish bakery where the employees and customers spoke as much Yiddish as Portuguese. And to have found an owner who allowed her to work only when I was in school.

“I don’t know any Emanual. Go away.” She’d switched to Yiddish.

“Manny. Eli’s friend.” He’d switched to Yiddish too.

Eli was the owner.

“I don’t know any Manny either.”

“Frieda, what are you doing in my home?”

“Go away. It’s not your home. Were you drinking?”

“A little.”

“A lot. Look at the number on the door. You don’t live here.”

Neither of them spoke for a minute.

“Oh my god.”

We heard heavy footsteps receding down the hall.

The next day, when my mother met me at school, she was carrying both our suitcases.

“Where are we going?”

“Barcelona.”

“I want to stay. Joana and Sara are here.” I started crying.

“Stop it. You’re making a scene. What did I tell you about inviting the wrong attention?”

“I want to stay.”

“Stop it, now! You’ll make new friends.”

“Is this because that man came to our apartment last night?”

“No, it’s because we have to go.”

“You knew him. He was from the bakery.” I was still crying.

“Listen to me, ziskayt. I asked him this morning if he came to our door yesterday evening and he said he didn’t. Now, he could have been embarrassed. But it also could have been someone else.”

“But he knew your name. And where you worked.”

“That’s what makes it so disturbing.”

She may have used the Yiddish word, kripi. Which is self-explanatory. Either way, I knew the battle was lost. And so, using the only weapon I had left, I sulked. On our way to the train station and on the train as well. And didn’t stop until I was in bed in a small room my mother found for us, in a cantor’s home, after asking more than a dozen people in the Jewish Quarter if they knew of a place two Jews escaping persecution might stay.

 

 

Can you, for those who don't know you already, tell something about yourself and how you became an author?

 

I felt incidental among, and largely ignored by, kids my age. I certainly wasn’t part of any in-group or popular in any way. I was also physically unwell for long periods of time and spent that time alone in my bedroom. At home, lots of people having lots of fun swirled around me and that only reinforced my feeling of isolation. So my internal life, which I discovered had no limits imposed on it and was controllable in a way my outer life wasn’t and could be rich and imaginative, became a kind of stand-in for what I was missing out on. I also loved music. In fact, my first influences were folk and rock stars, those who seemed to have something important to say about the world or, more precisely, those who interpreted it in a rather cynical, penetrating, fearless way. Bob Dylan, in particular, blew my mind. I didn’t just want to write songs like him, I wanted to be him. Unfortunately, I was a hopeless musician. Every instrument I tried to play sounded like I was torturing it. Or maybe worse, if there is such a thing. So I turned to poetry thinking I could at least emulate the lyrics (thankfully you don’t have to blow into, or strum, a pencil). I ended up writing a lot of poetry when I was young, which I suppose is a fairly typical rite of passage for a future writer. Of course I later threw away all those poems, after rereading them with the withering perspective of hindsight.

 

At the same time, I was also reading a lot. Poetry and fiction, The poetry, especially freeform, seemed within my reach as a young writer; the relative brevity, the absence of rules, the open-endedness. Novels, on the other hand, seemed as unreachable and complex as distant universes. I couldn’t fathom possessing the patience or discipline to write one. Then I read Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner and discovered writers with the sensibilities of poets. I read sentences that were so wildly unconventional, twisting and turning, veering off in unexpected directions before corralling themselves for a moment and then, with renewed energy, doing their beautiful zigzags all over again. Those sentences left me breathless. I knew right away I wanted to do the same thing. I began reading an entire book every night and at some point during that feverish period in my life, discovered Saul Bellow and suddenly all those previous, magnificent sentences I’d read now seemed like penultimate peaks on a mountain with his occupying the summit. I think I’ve read The Adventures of Augie March five times just to soak in its cadence. I doubted I could ever come close to writing with that type of depth of understanding of the human condition and raw electricity infusing every sentence, but I knew I was going to die trying. Later in life I had the similar experience of discovering something worth aspiring to when I first read Roberto Bolano. He seemed to spill entire libraries into his books. I believe his sentences occupy the same summit as the ones written by Saul Bellow.

 

What is something unique/quirky about you?

 

I have an obsessive ability to concentrate on a single thing for an inhumanly long amount of time. I suppose this is a helpful quirk for a writer despite how unhealthy it is in virtually every other aspect of life. There have been days when I’ve sat down to write and, without any sense of the passage of time, eight hours have passed. One would assume this means a steady and plentiful output of words. However, I’ve just as often produced only a few sentences as I have a few (or more) pages. Thankfully, my wife, with her abundant commonsense, will often scream at me from another room to get up, brush off the cobwebs, and go for a walk. 

 

Tell us something really interesting that's happened to you!

 

I was in Iceland about eight years ago and went to a local swim club at five a.m. and swam laps in a geothermally-heated pool. That isn’t the interesting part. This is: eighty-year-old men and women swam infinitely longer and faster than me and many looked more youthful than me. When I was done, I stood on the deck as they continued to speed past me in both directions and had an epiphany of sorts—that if I ever wanted to achieve true happiness, I should exercise alone (or with an unhealthy, overweight friend).   

 

What are some of your pet peeves?

 

I collect pet peeves like people collect baseball cards or stamps or coins. So we’d have to schedule a day-long meeting for me to have enough time to articulate them. The newest pet peeve I’ve added to my prodigious collection is how few people there are who convey meaningful information in few words. And how many people there are who convey meaningless information in many words.  

 

Where were you born/grew up at?

 

I was born, and grew up, in Toronto. Which in the province of Ontario. Which is in Canada. In case anyone outside of my country has a weird unmet need for geographical precision.

 

I also spent a couple years in New York City. While attending graduate school. It snowed only one day while I was living there. Which meant the climate grossly, perhaps purposefully, underachieved in making me feel at home.   

 

If you knew you'd die tomorrow, how would you spend your last day?

 

Paralyzed by regret probably. Trying and failing to convey something profound about life to, and adequately express my love for, my wife and children. Though, ideally, with ample debauchery.  

 

Who is your hero and why?

 

My son and daughter are uncompromisingly, courageously pursuing their dream careers instead of putting them off, like I did with mine, for far too many years. For that, they’re my heroes.

 

And also Bob Dylan. The reason for which I explain in great detail in my book, Auden Triller (Is A Killer). 

 

What kind of world ruler would you be?

 

The metric version. Same goes if I was a world meterstick. Just to annoy my American friends.     

 

What are you passionate about these days?

 

Poetry. I’m well into writing my third (and second publishable) book of poetry. The working title is, Bending In The Direction Of Her Sentences. It’s a series of spare raw poems about a doomed relationship. I read a lot of Elizabeth Browning and Louise Glück beforehand. Which helped me tap into the right mood—inspired and demoralized.

 

What do you do to unwind and relax?

 

I’ll for sure let you know when I come up with something effective. Or even promising. Music is, at best, a temporary solace. Truthfully, my first thought was watching the Toronto Maple Leafs play hockey. My second thought was that that’s actually persecution.

 

How to find time to write as a parent?

 

When my children were younger, I wrote through the night, between (and sometimes during) meetings at work. Really, whenever I had any precious free time.

 

Describe yourself in 5 words or less!

 

Uncomfortable in my skin. Devastatingly funny. And, clearly, someone who requires six, not five, words to describe himself.

 

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

 

When, in grade five, I wrote a love letter to a female classmate. In retrospect, it was good preparation for the rejection letters I would later receive from publishers.

 

Do you have a favorite movie?

 

Ordinary People. Which is anything but ordinary. It’s an extraordinary portrayal of a family shattered by grief. The scene in which they pose for a family picture at a Christmas party might be the best scene in the history of cinema.

 

Which of your novels can you imagine made into a movie?

 

The Anna Geller Invention is my love letter to poetry. It’s magically-real and whimsical and would, I believe, lend itself to a killer fantastical satire.     

 

What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?

 

My son and I travelled back and forth by car through Northern Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota to visit Duluth and Hibbing, where Bob Dylan was born and grew up. To say it was a religious experience would only serve to elevate religion to a perch on which it doesn’t deserve or belong. 

 

Brian Prousky spent most of his life as two distinct people. The first held a day job and raised a family and was public and sociable. The second ruminated over sentences and wrote books in secret and dreamed of a living a literary life. They shared little in common, mostly their obsessions: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Mozart, Saul Bellow, Roberto Bolano, tennis and hockey.

Somehow, summoning up a kind of courage or resolve he’d assumed was absent from his DNA, the first Brian Prousky left his day job, revealed his secret and dedicated himself full-time to writing. And the two Brian Prouskys became one. Now the author of five novels, a collection of short stories and two books of poetry, he lives and works in Toronto, where most of his characters, who struggle with secret and often conflicted lives of their own, and who never quite fit in, do as well.

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