The Singing Fire [Hardcover]

Set in the Jewish ghetto in late Victorian London, Lilian Nattel's richly detailed second novel, The Singing Fire, relates the stories of two immigrant women recently arrived from Poland. Young Nehama, who stole money and jewelry from her sisters in order to run away from home, is tricked into becoming a prostitute immediately after she steps off the boat. The well-off Emilia, who is introduced in numerous scenes back in Minsk, runs off to England, unmarried and pregnant, to escape her overbearing father. Nehama meanwhile flees her tormentor, the evil pedophile Squire, eventually marries, and becomes a tailor. When Emilia lands in London, Nehama saves her from a fate similar to her own by taking her in. Eventually, Emilia flees again, leaving her newborn with Nehama, who, unable to have children of her own, is happy enough to raise the child. Although Nehama ends up living in poverty and Emilia in relative luxury, both women find themselves in a situation where they must keep their pasts a secret from their good-hearted husbands. London and its fog-bound denizens are depicted in intricate detail: "alleys as narrow as needles," suppers of "bread smeared with garlic and chicken fat," pubs with "smoke thicker than fog." Nattel's female characters, in particular, have the breath of life (even the grandmother ghosts of which there are plenty). Despite a somewhat thin plot, The Singing Fire offers excellent period dialogue, an abundance of Jewish lore and sayings, and a wonderfully touching ending. --Mark Frutkin

Two determined Jewish runaways strive for better lives in chaotic turn-of-the-century London in Nattel's rich and lovingly written second novel (after 1999's The River Midnight). Seventeen-year-old Nehama, who arrives from Poland in 1875, is quickly tricked into prostitution and brutalized by her boss, the squire. She escapes that sordid life-which Nattel unflinchingly, chillingly portrays-when she's taken in by a young couple in Frying Pan Alley. She becomes a skilled seamstress and eventually marries a kind tailor who knows little of her past. In 1886, Emilia, privileged but pregnant and unwed, flees her cruel father and weak mother back in Minsk. Nehama's and Emilia's paths converge when Nehama prevents the ruthless brothel owner who enslaved her from doing the same to Emilia. Emilia, who's posing as a widow, lodges with Nehama, but soon breaks under the drudgery of London's ghetto life. Leaving her newborn daughter with Nehama, who is unable to bear children after two miscarriages, Emilia decamps to London's Soho, where she works as a shop girl and catches the eye of Jacob, a successful Jewish writer who thinks the "golden-haired and gray-eyed" Emilia is a gentile. Both women are haunted by the pasts they conceal from their men, and sometimes comforted by beneficent ghosts: into this story of struggle and assimilation, Nattel skillfully weaves the guardian spirits of Nehama's grandmother and Emilia's father's first wife. The pacing is leisurely, and the prose is lovely, leavened by subtle humor and infused with intelligence.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

When small-town girls defy their families and flee to make their fortunes in the big city, we know they will suffer, and "no good will come of it." Except, that is, for the joy of reading about their adventures, as in Nattel's new novel, which adds definitely to the pleasures of the coming-of-age genre, female division. Craving independence, Nehama steals from her sisters for passage to turn-of-the-century London. But the Jewish girl has no English. She is quickly pressed into prostitution, losing her sense of smell along the way, but escapes into the East End's dangerous streets, appositely named Frying Pan Alley and such. She befriends another, pregnant runaway, Emilia, whose child she adopts. Each young woman goes her separate way, with Emilia's daughter the linchpin between the two. Set "when not to be new . . . was nothing," in a time of "bourgeois decadence" and The Yellow Book, with its stories of syphilis, slums, and illegitimacy, The Singing Fire portrays an era as compelling as its characters. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

“By turns earthy and lyrical, The Singing Fire authoritatively conjures up the fog- and smoke-filled breath of London, and at the same time it’s steeped in an atmosphere of mystery, reaching for soaring, transcendental truths. Nattel’s greatest strength. . .is as an old-fashioned storyteller. . . I must confess, I wept unabashedly more than once as I raced through this fine novel.”
—The Globe and Mail

"Marvelous...vibrant....Her prose is just as finely balanced, rich in humor that’s never simply for laughs ... and filled with passages of heartbreaking beauty that acknowledge the permanent scars left by tragedy but affirm the healing powers of love and self-knowledge. Beautifully-written, strongly imagined and deeply felt."
—Kirkus Reviews

“The Singing Fire is sure to be a big hit. Nattel has so many strengths as a writer that it’s tempting just to list them: a historian’s eye for detail and language, a storyteller’s mastery of rhythm and suspense, a modern woman’s sympathetic understanding for those who’ve preceded her.”
—Toronto Star

“…At times heartbreaking without being tragic, and often heart filling without being sentimental. Nattel’s novel is a celebration of the lives of women and the generations of mothers who support each other through family and friendship. The Singing Fire ushers in the new year with a resounding message of love and hope.”
—The Edmonton Journal

“Lilian Nattel writes vivid prose. Her description of the cold, mucky streets of London, dimly lit by gaslight, where people throw pots of slop and other unmentionable refuse on to the rooftops and into the streets, is captivating in its realism.”
—The Vancouver Sun

“Once again, Nattel’s descriptive powers shine, and her evocation of place is Dickensian.”
—National Post

“…here’s betting that most readers will end up loving headstrong, passionate Nehama almost as a sister, and recognizing this magical book as one of the best of the new year.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)

Praise for The River Midnight:
“Nattel has the gift not only of telling the truth about women’s lives but the rarer gift of creating a world the reader can live inside. . . . Radiant and magical.”
Toronto Star

“Richly imagined, sensuous in its details, spiced with energetic dialogue, The River Midnight offers pleasures on every page.”
—The Globe and Mail

“Like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County and García Márquez’s Macondo, Nattel’s imagined backwater is shot through with mythic significance [and] the brilliantly patterned minutiae of daily life.”
—TIME

From the acclaimed author of The River Midnight comes the story two emigrant women who change each other’s lives and, despite following separate paths, are united in their love of a child.

In 1875, Nehama arrives at St. Katharine’s Dock, having fled the expectations of her family in Poland. Planning to create a new life for herself and then send for her family to join her, she isn’t prepared for the reality of London’s East End, where only a block can separate the lively street markets from the dens of iniquity. Her dreams of independence falter when she is tricked into becoming a prostitute by a man called the Squire, who poses as a member of the Newcomers’ Assistance Committee. Brutalized and trapped, Nehama soon begins to lose hope, but when she becomes pregnant she realizes she must get away to save her child. With only the whispers of her late grandmother to guide her, she escapes and is taken in by a kind couple, who help her to re-create herself in the respectable immigrant community of the East End. There, despite a miscarriage, she begins to find a niche for herself as a seamstress and marries a tailor named Nathan. Sadly, however, she is unable to escape the pain of losing her baby and is haunted by the conviction that her sordid life in Dorset Street is to blame for her childlessness.

Emilia arrives in London in 1886, having fled from a life in Minsk that would have been considered privileged if it weren’t for her domineering and unpredictable father. Her dreams of living in an Italian villa with the mother she left behind have not prepared her for the rough life that faces Jewish immigrants in London. She is also pregnant, and it’s only Nehama’s intervention that saves her from the clutches of the Squire. But the struggles of life in the working-class Jewish neighborhood are not what she imagined for herself, and, leaving her baby with Nehama, she escapes to the wealthier streets of the city’s West End. There, she re-creates herself as a gentile and marries into a wealthy family, but cannot escape the memory of everything she has left behind.

Years pass as Nehama and Emilia follow their separate paths, each trying to ensure herself a successful future — Nehama dreams of opening a store of her own, Emilia plans to have another child. Yet each realizes that it is impossible to do so without coming to terms with the past. This is asking a lot of two women who have seen such sorrow of their own, and who also remember that of their mothers and grandmothers. But as they discover, the tests of the past, when seen from the present, are also proof of strength and faith. It is this reserve that both women draw on to make peace with their new lives, and in doing so, they arrive in places that hold some common ground.

With vivid prose and rich detail, Lilian Nattel weaves the lives of these two women not only together but into the tapestry of nineteenth-century London. Taking us into the streets and alleys of the East End, Nattel honours the spirit of the Jewish immigrant community and most of all the women who lived at its heart.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

“By turns earthy and lyrical, The Singing Fire authoritatively conjures up the fog- and smoke-filled breath of London, and at the same time it’s steeped in an atmosphere of mystery, reaching for soaring, transcendental truths. Nattel’s greatest strength. . .is as an old-fashioned storyteller. . . I must confess, I wept unabashedly more than once as I raced through this fine novel.”
—The Globe and Mail

"Marvelous...vibrant....Her prose is just as finely balanced, rich in humor that’s never simply for laughs ... and filled with passages of heartbreaking beauty that acknowledge the permanent scars left by tragedy but affirm the healing powers of love and self-knowledge. Beautifully-written, strongly imagined and deeply felt."
—Kirkus Reviews

“The Singing Fire is sure to be a big hit. Nattel has so many strengths as a writer that it’s tempting just to list them: a historian’s eye for detail and language, a storyteller’s mastery of rhythm and suspense, a modern woman’s sympathetic understanding for those who’ve preceded her.”
—Toronto Star

“…At times heartbreaking without being tragic, and often heart filling without being sentimental. Nattel’s novel is a celebration of the lives of women and the generations of mothers who support each other through family and friendship. The Singing Fire ushers in the new year with a resounding message of love and hope.”
—The Edmonton Journal

“Lilian Nattel writes vivid prose. Her description of the cold, mucky streets of London, dimly lit by gaslight, where people throw pots of slop and other unmentionable refuse on to the rooftops and into the streets, is captivating in its realism.”
—The Vancouver Sun

“Once again, Nattel’s descriptive powers shine, and her evocation of place is Dickensian.”
—National Post

“…here’s betting that most readers will end up loving headstrong, passionate Nehama almost as a sister, and recognizing this magical book as one of the best of the new year.”
—The Gazette (Montreal)

Praise for The River Midnight:
“Nattel has the gift not only of telling the truth about women’s lives but the rarer gift of creating a world the reader can live inside. . . . Radiant and magical.”
Toronto Star

“Richly imagined, sensuous in its details, spiced with energetic dialogue, The River Midnight offers pleasures on every page.”
—The Globe and Mail

“Like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County and García Márquez’s Macondo, Nattel’s imagined backwater is shot through with mythic significance [and] the brilliantly patterned minutiae of daily life.”
—TIME

Growing up in Montreal, Lilian Nattel soaked up the stories and customs of her Jewish culture and learned Yiddish from her parents: “My parents spoke Yiddish at home when they didn't want us kids to understand, so of course I learned it well.” The language has been useful while doing research for her novels, as she has been able to read prayers, poems and memoirs in the original. And for Nattel, adherence to historical fact is crucial to bringing her characters to life. As she explained in one interview, “I can’t bring myself to be inaccurate. If I’m writing about someone wearing a dress in 1895, I want to know the fashion in 1895, what colours were popular in 1895, I want to know the street names, what kind of people lived on that street, I want to know whether they have restaurants yet, how people cooked.”

For Nattel, writing has always been an integral part of who she is and being a full-time author has always been her goal, but it took years for her to write and publish her first book. It was while working as an accountant that she realized she would have to take a new approach and make some sacrifices in order for her dream to come true. Casting aside the preconceptions we all have about writers being driven only by their art, at the expense of everything else in life, Nattel came up with a solid plan that allowed her to explore taking on writing as a profession. “What I did was actually write up a contract with myself,” she has explained in one interview. “It was a five-year contract in which I contracted to give myself five years to see what I could do with writing because it meant a lot of financial sacrifices to have a part-time accounting practice.” In that five years she sold some stories to literary journals and began her first novel, so she signed herself up for another five years. And it was then that The River Midnight caught the attention of her agent, Helen Heller, and then an editor at Scribners in New York. The book was also signed by Knopf Canada and featured in their New Face of Fiction program.

The River Midnight was published in 1999 to international acclaim. Set in 1894, in the fictional village of Blaszka, Poland, the novel tells the magical and multi-layered story of four women who are brought closer together by unexpected love, an imprisoned daughter, and two orphan children sent home from America. One reviewer compared Nattel’s Blaszka, so full of “mythic significance,” to Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo and William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. The River Midnight won the Martin and Beatrice Fischer Award, and rights have been sold in seven countries so far. After its publication, Nattel was finally able to devote herself to writing full-time, though she still approaches her work with the discipline she needed early on: “Writing is a combination of effort and effortless, but there’s always a lot more effort. If you just wait for inspiration to strike, it’s never going to happen. You really have to put in the hours.”

After the success of The River Midnight, Nattel was determined to make sure that her second novel lived up to the expectations of her readers. So much so that she even tore up the third draft of what was to become The Singing Fire. Originally, the book was about a Victorian spinster, but the story just wasn’t coming together — all except for about thirty pages, which introduced a girl named Gittel. “I was attempting to write an easy novel,” Nattel has said, “and this other story was trying to push up from underneath.” Beginning again, Nattel created Emilia, and then Nehama, who would become the strongest voice in the finished book. As the story was gestating in Nattel’s mind, it was also strongly influenced by a major change in her own life: the adoption of two little girls. Her love for her new daughters inspired Nattel to explore what it meant to be a mother, and an adoptive mother, which became a major theme in The Singing Fire.

But for Nattel, having her fiction influenced by her own experiences is nothing new. In fact, it is her own life history that has always driven her to explore, and then to write. “I'm fascinated by history, seeing our present being shaped in the past. This has led me to explore the issues that are important to me, whether it is women’s friendship, motherhood, reconciliation or adoption in the historical times and places that have so much influenced who I am now.” Today, Nattel is hard at work on a third novel, set in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, which is narrated by an elderly Jewish woman recalling her youth.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Prologue

Longing
1886

They met in a place of smoky bricks and smoky fogs and a million pigeons nesting by a million chimneys. Sea winds blew the fog from the docks to the depot, from the railroad tracks to the high road, from there to the lane, working into all the hidden alleys as narrow as needles. In the mud of the alley, cobblestones separated so donkeys and barrows could enter, brick walls leaned back to make room for stalls, and up high hung clothes that trembled in the air. Everything born and everything made found its way over the river to London. And here they met, the two mothers, the one we remember and the one we forget. The river brought them, the docks received them, the streets took them in.

It was in Whitechapel with the wind sweeping up the high road past the hospital and the convent and the bell foundry tolling bells. Carts and carriages jammed the wide road, steam came from cookshops and drizzle from the heavens. In the wind, street matrons held on to their hats, for every woman wore one, even if it was just a battered sailor hat, and she used her nails to fight instead of hatpins. It was time to retrieve the Sunday boots from the pawnshop, for wage packets were in hand, and shopkeepers stood in doorways shouting their wares above the sound of wheels and wind and the rattle of trains, their windows bright in the gray-green rain. The wind raged past new warehouses six stories high, holding all the goods of the Empire for the West End, it swept past the Jerusalem Music Palace with its twenty-seven thousand crystals in the gaslit chandelier, past the gin palace of dazzling color, past the club, the assembly room, the shooting gallery, past all the old houses, built after the Great Fire, now crumbling from stone and brick into the ash of the street. The wind saw the nuns and the Salvation Army Band, with its brass instruments and its bold uniforms, and everywhere the placards and posters in Yiddish: “Milk fresh from the cow!” “Cheapest and best funerals!” “New melodrama starring the Great Eagle, Jacob Adler!”

This was the high road of the ghetto, the one square mile where Yiddish was spoken, the irritating pimple on the backside of London, the subject of parliamentary debate, the hundred thousand newcomers among the millions, ready to take fog as their mother’s milk here in the East End, where all the noisy, dirty, and stinking industries were exiled from the city.

The Jewish streets stretched up from Whitechapel Road, pushing into the twisting alleys, pushing back the pimps and the prostitutes and the thieves whose stronghold was just above in Dorset Street. Smack in the middle was the Jews’ Free School, to the right was the steam bath, to the left the rag market. The dairyman from Ilford was carting his milk cans full of vodka to sell. If you liked to gamble, down below was Shmolnik’s coffee house, and if you were hungry, you could have the best fish and chips, invented up here by a Dutch Jew in the Lane.

It was Saturday night in the Lane, meaning Petticoat Lane and all its contiguous streets. Among the tailors, the corset sellers, the letter writers, the cigar and boot makers, naphtha lamps flared in the darkness. People spoke Yiddish, they spoke English, they spoke in the language of the street, where their lives took place. “Hi! Hi! See the strong man! See the singing dwarf! See the contortionist! Only a penny!” In the dusk there were crowds of buyers and sellers, and between the stalls, one man juggled fire and another swallowed it. The fortune-teller’s bird picked out cards with its beak and every card told a fortune. Signs advertised marvels. Oilcloth guaranteed to last twenty years. Magic firelight that a little child could use. Medicine sure to cure the ills of all five million cells in the human body. Here you could buy used goods of every kind except for one thing. Even in the rain there was a queue for it, people eating supper and talking and waiting. And what did they want that they couldn’t get secondhand? A ticket to the Yiddish theater of course.

No one in the world loved theater more than Londoners, and among them none more than the Jews. When they came to the free land, the old made a match with the new, and a butcher from home who changed his name to Smith built the Yiddish theater. And what a theater! It had a parterre and a balcony, curtains with pulleys, chandeliers, trapdoors in the stage for every sort of magical effect discussed by the people waiting in the rain to buy balcony tickets. The great Jacob Adler was playing the lead tonight, and even the beigel seller, whose husband gambled her meager earnings, had found the pennies for tickets to the theater.

There were other important people waiting in the queue, a boot-maker who wrote poems, a presser who wrote bad plays, a tailor who told bad jokes, and his wife, who was pregnant and dreaming of the baby. All around them was tobacco smoke and the talk of the street, of work and no work, the horse that won, the husband that ran away, the children’s boots given out by the school. Someone spat and someone hissed while ticket holders for the good seats went inside, among them an old man and his grandson, a journalist who had no idea that his future wife was on her way from Minsk. For in the Court of Heaven, there is a golden throne and a golden desk where God puts strange matters into a golden book. And so it was written: the young woman from Minsk and the tailor’s wife. Only King Solomon the Wise could judge between them.

It was all very well for the Holy One above to make such plans in heaven. But earth is for people, and the mother of a people has to go with them. She can’t be left behind with nothing but her shroud crumbling into dust. And so she rose from the graveyard -- maybe it was in Minsk or Pinsk or Plotsk -- and came with the boats to Irongate Stairs. And though her grandchildren would speak a different mother tongue and have customs unknowable to her, they would also rise from the graveyard for the sake of their children, so that they would not be abandoned in their exile. The human heart, knowing it will die alone, needs to belong to others so it can live; those others who are somehow like us -- and in being like us raise us out of the uncountable billions that rise and fall, rise and fall, unremarkable as ants, as cells, as the hands clapping when the curtain rises, torchlights burning at the foot of the stage.