‘The Wittenbergs’ by Sarah Klassen

Reviewed by Elin Thordarson

What is this compulsion we have to recommend books to one another? We’ll even give our books away in recommending them. “Pass it on to someone when you’re done,” we’ll say. We may buy multiples of a book that has touched us to give our innermost circle of friends. We may push copies of some of our most cherished possessions into our visitors’ hands as they leave our homes. And with Christmas around the corner, I know I’ll be buying some of my own childhood favourites for the little ones in the family.

Literature plays a central role in Winnipeg writer Sarah Klassen’s first novel The Wittenbergs. Klassen, a widely-published poet and short fiction writer, has crafted a multi-generational family saga set in Winnipeg right before the Gulf War and the fall of the Soviet Union, that also deftly dips into family memories of Ukraine during the Russian Revolution.

In the preface to his The Books in My Life, Henry Miller writes, “Life itself is enough of a jungle – a very real and instructive one to say the least. But you may ask, may not books be a help, a guide in fighting our way through the wilderness?” Klassen’s Wittenberg family territory, it becomes clear, is a vast and quivering jungle. The mother, Millicent, is an increasing melancholic; the father, Joseph, anticipating promotion at the high school where he is vice principal, falls in love with a younger under-colleague; their elder daughter, Alice, a mother to two small boys with a genetic syndrome, Fragile X, desperately seeks an answer to the question “what is God thinking?” And Granmarie, the Wittenberg grandmother, as her final testimony retells from memory and photographs the tragic family stories on the steppes of Ukraine and the Mennonite mass exodus to the New World into Winnipeg’s Edison Avenue neighbourhood.

But Klassen opens the story with our protagonist, the high school senior Mia Wittenberg, sitting by the Red River reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and quoting lines from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” Although each of the members of the Wittenberg family are sensitive to the world around them in their own ways, Mia’s inherent sensitivity comes with a powerful awareness of duty to understand and preserve the family’s past, as she is the receptacle and collector of Granmarie’s stories.

In the same way that New Zealand’s Lloyd Jones uses Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations to lend shape to his characters’ lives, to provide context, meaning, and explanation for the circumstances in his 2007 novel Mister Pip, Klassen uses various pieces of literature to guide a deeper reading of her narrative. Everywhere are lines of poetry, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, from the Bible, and a collection of Jane Austen novels acts as a centerpiece in the artifacts of Granmarie’s life on a shelf in her home. Meanwhile Mia reads Leo Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie in her high school English class. And, most significantly, here and there Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya appears.

I find it difficult to resist tracking down the more notable works of literature made reference to in a book, and as though a recommendation has been whispered, reading them alongside as a way of enriching my experience of the book. Sarah Klassen has evidently discovered what she believes is of vital importance in, for instance, the final scene of Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya, in which the character Uncle Vanya is told by his niece that for them life is completely unbearable, but their chance for sweet rest will come after life and work is done. Chekhov’s play comes up in connection with Mia’s father’s affair, in Mia’s recording and understanding of her Granmarie’s life stories, and in her return to the Old World and Yalta on the Dnieper River, whence her family stories originate.

The Wittenberg family shares the name of the site where Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church, so a family reformation is demanded. And in the end, each of the characters is just beginning to find their way out of the more tangled parts of the jungle of their lives. Using what are undoubtedly some of her key sources in world literature, Klassen deftly juggles the intangibles of the thick of life: the past’s hold, our memories and life stories, the poetics of immigration and exile, the violent attachments of family, love’s selfless grace, and faith in what is unknown about this world. Her writing is powerful, incredibly lyrical, and the characters hard to shake, even after the The Wittenbergs is said and done and put back on the shelf.

Turnstone | 432 pages |  $21.00 | paper | ISBN # 978-0888014467