They recall the stones Jews leave on the graves of loved ones, and the rock on which Abraham nearly sacrificed his son, known as the Foundation Stone in Jerusalem: were it to be removed, watery chaos would engulf the universe (so a rabbi friend informs me). Silent, lovely and impenetrable, the stones express both Lily’s absence and her presence. Ruth’s story then becomes an intermittent quest to find out why her mother left, and who and where the strange and broken woman is who sends her stones as gifts, unsigned, accompanied only by an index card that names the lake beside which each was found. And now, for the first time, I wanted more.” It was a given, a stable fact of life that was definitional, not dynamic, like the hole in the center of a bagel, without which a bagel would be something else. Her absence was more a background to my life than anything else. She had left soon after I was born, and no one knew where she had gone. The arrival of this opaque metonym-by-mail, the first of many she will receive from Lily, transforms the child: “All my life I had been a girl without a mother. Her husband, Nathan, is one of them, doubly so: it was his brother whom she traveled half the world to marry, sight unseen, before he took one look at her “shadowed face, the dress, all wrong, that had obviously been chosen with care,” and fled from the engagement.As she herself would all too soon flee from Nathan and their infant daughter, Ruth. And the world she marries into is populated by strangers too. She brings with her an uncut diamond, a journal written in Yiddish and the grief of a brutally erased world.īut if her sorrow is genuine, her other possessions, including the name Lily, belong to a stranger they aren’t hers. The bride, Lily Azerov, is a refugee from Poland, via Palestine.

When the Nazis at the border asked what she was taking with her, she replied, “Only what you see!” And they let her through.įrika might have stepped from the pages of Nancy Richler’s moving third novel, “The Imposter Bride,” which opens in 1946 at a wedding in Montreal’s Jewish community. So she wore her money on her hat, in the form of a diamond brooch, which - thus flaunted - passed for fake. She knew if she were caught smuggling out the means of subsistence, she would be arrested. A family story: My mother’s friend Frika, a Viennese Jew, managed to leave Austria for America after the Anschluss.

The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler