Reviewed by Dave Margoshes
First some biographical information. Sharon Abron Drache is a woman in her late sixties. So is Barbara Klein-Muskrat, the protagonist of her fictional pseudo-memoir of that title. Drache was born in Toronto but lived most of her adult life in Ottawa. Ditto Klein-Muskrat. Drache was married to, then divorced from a prominent lawyer. Klein-Muskrat, same thing. Drache Jewish, Klein-Muskrat Jewish (and no, Barbara Klein didn’t marry an Aboriginal man named Muskrat, but a Jew named Muskovitch to wind up with that moniker); Drache a writer of short stories and novels that explore and often poke fun at Jewish life, Klein-Muskrat the same; Drache a prolific writer of book reviews (The Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen, National Post, etc. etc.) almost exclusively of books by Canadian Jews, Klein-Muskrat – you guessed it!
I detail all this because whilst navigating your way through the interconnected stories in Barbara Klein-Muskrat, Then and Now, which spans some thirty years in the title character’s life, it’s often hard to tell where Sharon Abron Drache ends and Barbara Klein-Muskrat begins. And frankly, I don’t know Drache well enough to even hazard a guess. This is certainly autobiographical fiction, but just how autobiographical I can’t say.
(Disclaimer here. Drache and I have never met. But we have exchanged the odd email, as writers tend to do, and she’s reviewed my books twice that I know of, most recently in The Globe and Mail earlier this year.)
Barbara Klein-Muskrat, Then and Now is Drache’s third collection of stories, along with a novel, two books for children and the aforementioned numerous book reviews. All of her previous fiction, especially the stories in The Golden Ghetto and The Mikveh Man, are laced with humour, often sharp-edged – although she writes with great affection for Jewish life in Canada, she also never misses an opportunity to get in a sly dig when she can. There’s plenty of that wasp-sting wit on display in this new collection.
Although Drache’s tone throughout these stories is usually light, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, occasionally she lets loose with a zinger that stopped me cold with admiration, like this one, in a story (“Ruhama Fishbein and Me”) about high school days: “Since we both have steady boyfriends, their sterling silver I.D. bracelets glisten on our wrists. We belong to these boys, our parents, our religion, and even to the stores where our clothes were purchased. – who are we anyway?”
Here’s another quote that caught my attention: “It is impossible to explain what happens when a man and a woman who have loved each other decide to part.” This not especially perceptive observation comes from Barbara Klein-Muskrat late in the book, in relation to the end of a post-marital love affair, but the breakup of her marriage, and her attempt to explain, is very much at the heart of these stories – that, and the deaths of her parents, first her beloved father, who continues on as a very lively, talkative ghost, then her very Jewish “Jewish mother.”
Her dead parents haunt the stories, as does, to a lesser degree, the ghost of Mordecai Richler, probably Canada’s greatest Jewish writer and very much a role model for Barbara. Drache has Richler provide a brief comic turn in an early story, in which Barbara Klein-Muskrat, reviewing the master’s latest novel, butters up his mother – another very Jewish “Jewish mother,” no surprise – to win an exclusive interview.
In alternating comic and musing modes, we meet Klein-Muskrat’s parents, sons and assorted other relatives and friends, literary and otherwise, including her nemesis, Yolande, a half Salish-Lillooet, half Jewish woman who shares Klein-Muskrat’s interest, first, in the accordion, then in her husband. In addition to Richler, the legendary publisher Jack McClelland makes a cameo under his own name, and some other CanLiterati appear artfully disguised. Some of this is laugh-out-loud hilarious; almost all of the pages of this short collection about the ups and downs of an aspiring writer are amusing.
Drache has been compared to Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer and even Kafka, some other notable Jewish writers, and Dorothy Parker, she of the irrepressible cutting wit. Literary comparisons are always dicey, in my view – anyone can be compared to anyone else, after all. I’d prefer to say that Drache is a one-of-a-kind, unlike anyone else writing in Canada, well, not since the death of her hero Richler.
Toward the book’s end, Drache observes that, “like the best Canadian salmon,” her alter ego Barbara Klein-Muskrat “considered herself happy and hugely content, residing exactly where she belonged, in a sealed tin complete with appropriate logo.” Not a bad place for any writer – anybody – to be as the end of life draws near.
Inanna | 192 pages | $22.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1926708850
‘Barbara Klein-Muskrat, Then and Now’ by Sharon Abron Drache
Book Reviews
First some biographical information. Sharon Abron Drache is a woman in her late sixties. So is Barbara Klein-Muskrat, the protagonist of her fictional pseudo-memoir of that title. Drache was born in Toronto but lived most of her adult life in Ottawa. Ditto Klein-Muskrat. Drache was married to, then divorced from a prominent lawyer. Klein-Muskrat, same thing. Drache Jewish, Klein-Muskrat Jewish (and no, Barbara Klein didn’t marry an Aboriginal man named Muskrat, but a Jew named Muskovitch to wind up with that moniker); Drache a writer of short stories and novels that explore and often poke fun at Jewish life, Klein-Muskrat the same; Drache a prolific writer of book reviews (The Globe and Mail, Ottawa Citizen, National Post, etc. etc.) almost exclusively of books by Canadian Jews, Klein-Muskrat – you guessed it!
I detail all this because whilst navigating your way through the interconnected stories in Barbara Klein-Muskrat, Then and Now, which spans some thirty years in the title character’s life, it’s often hard to tell where Sharon Abron Drache ends and Barbara Klein-Muskrat begins. And frankly, I don’t know Drache well enough to even hazard a guess. This is certainly autobiographical fiction, but just how autobiographical I can’t say.
(Disclaimer here. Drache and I have never met. But we have exchanged the odd email, as writers tend to do, and she’s reviewed my books twice that I know of, most recently in The Globe and Mail earlier this year.)
Barbara Klein-Muskrat, Then and Now is Drache’s third collection of stories, along with a novel, two books for children and the aforementioned numerous book reviews. All of her previous fiction, especially the stories in The Golden Ghetto and The Mikveh Man, are laced with humour, often sharp-edged – although she writes with great affection for Jewish life in Canada, she also never misses an opportunity to get in a sly dig when she can. There’s plenty of that wasp-sting wit on display in this new collection.
Although Drache’s tone throughout these stories is usually light, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, occasionally she lets loose with a zinger that stopped me cold with admiration, like this one, in a story (“Ruhama Fishbein and Me”) about high school days: “Since we both have steady boyfriends, their sterling silver I.D. bracelets glisten on our wrists. We belong to these boys, our parents, our religion, and even to the stores where our clothes were purchased. – who are we anyway?”
Here’s another quote that caught my attention: “It is impossible to explain what happens when a man and a woman who have loved each other decide to part.” This not especially perceptive observation comes from Barbara Klein-Muskrat late in the book, in relation to the end of a post-marital love affair, but the breakup of her marriage, and her attempt to explain, is very much at the heart of these stories – that, and the deaths of her parents, first her beloved father, who continues on as a very lively, talkative ghost, then her very Jewish “Jewish mother.”
Her dead parents haunt the stories, as does, to a lesser degree, the ghost of Mordecai Richler, probably Canada’s greatest Jewish writer and very much a role model for Barbara. Drache has Richler provide a brief comic turn in an early story, in which Barbara Klein-Muskrat, reviewing the master’s latest novel, butters up his mother – another very Jewish “Jewish mother,” no surprise – to win an exclusive interview.
In alternating comic and musing modes, we meet Klein-Muskrat’s parents, sons and assorted other relatives and friends, literary and otherwise, including her nemesis, Yolande, a half Salish-Lillooet, half Jewish woman who shares Klein-Muskrat’s interest, first, in the accordion, then in her husband. In addition to Richler, the legendary publisher Jack McClelland makes a cameo under his own name, and some other CanLiterati appear artfully disguised. Some of this is laugh-out-loud hilarious; almost all of the pages of this short collection about the ups and downs of an aspiring writer are amusing.
Drache has been compared to Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer and even Kafka, some other notable Jewish writers, and Dorothy Parker, she of the irrepressible cutting wit. Literary comparisons are always dicey, in my view – anyone can be compared to anyone else, after all. I’d prefer to say that Drache is a one-of-a-kind, unlike anyone else writing in Canada, well, not since the death of her hero Richler.
Toward the book’s end, Drache observes that, “like the best Canadian salmon,” her alter ego Barbara Klein-Muskrat “considered herself happy and hugely content, residing exactly where she belonged, in a sealed tin complete with appropriate logo.” Not a bad place for any writer – anybody – to be as the end of life draws near.
Inanna | 192 pages | $22.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1926708850