The Last Chicken in America by Ellen Litman

I grew up cherishing the idea of my ancestors having migrated here from Poland. Those around me never could furnish me with much in the way of details, or if they could, weren't really interested in doing so. Some probably just didn't think it was all that important a fact or story. Or, it was something they didn't want to remember or have remembered. They were American. Period. Perhaps in compensation, I've always been drawn to fiction that is focused on the experience.

Ellen Litman's Last Chicken in America linked set of short stories captures the experience of Russian Jews who come to a particular Pittsburgh neighborhood (Squirrel Hill) in the nineties. It provides vivid and carefully drawn detail on the emotional and psychological costs incurred by the move. Folks with all sorts of educational and occupational attainments back home are forced to work menial jobs. Isolated by language and culture from the larger world of their new home, they are often forced to rely on an all too small circle of other immigrants for companionship and help. Parents find themselves dependent on children for acts of simple survival and grown resentful as their children fell smothered. Often reading of all these costs, you wonder. Was it worth it?

Of course, the move wasn't always much of a choice. Many of the characters are Jewish and are fleeing. However, many of the characters seem to find their new home equal parts surprisse and disappointment. Their move has had effects they didn't anticipate. One character, lamenting the failed marriage of one set of friends and the hasty May-December marriage of another, remarks to her husband, "What is America doing to us Seryozha?" Seryozha replies, "Its not America. Its them."

Beyond immigration, Litman explores the pressures and attractions of assimilation. Several stories are Masha's, an ambitious, only daughter who looks to flee the conservative, gloomy mindset of her parents but fears she will never be American. As she puts it: "I watched CNN, I ate out, I read American books. But I lacked their boldness and fluency, their flippant resistance to gloom. My father said I'd never be quite like them."

Masha's thumbnail above of America is one of the appeals of immigrant lit. It always provides a mirror. However, these stories are better than that. They speak to universals. In a number of different ways, Litman's immigrants are folks who are negotiating common transfers. They are growing old. They are moving from childhood to adulthood. They are attempting to find their place in new marriages. Unless you're odd, you will see yourself. And, Litman's accounts are infused with compassion.

Because I could not wait for Death....

Martine Leavitt's meditative and charming YA novel, Keturah and Lord Death, not only takes death as its theme, but features him as a character, a romantic lead at that.

Yep, death's a Romeo in this odd mix of a book. To borrow Australian slang come across in Peter Carey's last novel, this book is a 'bitzer.' It's a bit of this and a bit of that and never any one thing entirely.

While ostensibly marketed to young adults, I wonder if it might not best be appreciated by adults. I can imagine many parents would be worried about their child's reading it. While it verges at times on allegory, it's clearly set in world resembling medieval England at the time of the plague, with numerous historically feasible details. Yet, it is off on many details and would afford a mediocre history lesson. What's more, that history lesson would be interrupted by bursts of romance clothed in prose more likely found in a good bodice-ripper than your standard historical novel. The cover doesn't mislead by any measure.

Quibbles aside, it is compulsively readable. Leavitt is a true craftswoman. Her sentences, her chapters, the novel are all well-crafted and shapely. Her lines often launch into lyrical, romantic sweeps.

Keturah is the teller of her tale. It is a campfire tale in which a 'fictional' Keturah wanders into the woods after a large, mysterious stag. She becomes hopelessly lost in the woods, and after three days in the woods Death, as in Lord Death, comes upon her. Keturah is not ready; waggish, Lord Death responds, "No one is ready." Keturah though actually manages to fend off death, at least for a day, by telling a story about a young girl who wanders into the wood, comes upon death. She begs him for more time so she might find and experience her true love. Lord Death is intrigued and wonders how the fictional Lord Death will respond to this, but Keturah refuse to tell him the end, till the next day. What's more, dubious of the stories notions of true love, Lord Death promises to give Keturah her life if she can find a true love before they meet next evening to conclude the story.

Thus, the Scherezade pattern of this book is established. For two more nights, Keturah manages to weave yet another unfinished thread into the story of and for her life. In the intervening days, she searches her small, backwater of a village in hopes of finding her true love. There is also another subplot where Keturah, acting on information given her by Lord Death [pretty good source] works to convince the local lord to upgrade the town so as to avert the onset of plague. This little subplot kind of just got in the way, but.....

When asked to describe how it feels to die, Lord Death claims, "You experience something similar every day...It is like every morning when you wake up." However, he then adds, "But to know that is never enough." This book is an attempt to know death; to the extent it's cognitively possible, it is an exercise in imaginatively trying it on. According to the afterword, when she was a child, Leavitt's sister died at the age of eleven from Cystic Fibrosis. The book is an adult's imaginative attempt to walk with this child-sister on "the long journey dying must be for a child to make alone."

So, while Lord Death is frightening, Keturah's encounter presents other sides. He provides benefit. Her nightly encounters with him lead Keturah to see the wonder of the everyday and value it more. He drives her to find her own story, to find her own heart. In a weird, paradoxical reversal, at the end, Keturah find her heart is set on Lord Death; he proves to be the true love for whom she yearned when she begged him for more time at the beginning of the book. In explanation,she confesses:

...I could not touch [others'] happinesss, could not hold it. It was a dream and not real. What was real was the sense that in this life I had never quite been satisfied, had never quite been satisfied, had never long been at peace, had never loved or been fully loved as I longed to be.

I'm not sure that I find this reversal, this somewhat sudden awareness, entirely convincing. Keturah hardly seems a gloomy sort. She loses both parents at a young age, but is raised by grand-parents who "drew [her] into their circle of uncommon love and established in her forever a desire to have such a thing for herself someday."

Being a speculative sort myself, I note but am much less troubled by some of the odd little metaphysical conceptions that mark Keturah's thinking. Many of these don't seem to fit the ostensible setting of the story; I honestly wonder if anybody thought like this at the "time" of the book. Granted, Leavitt leaves the time kind of nebulous, but it does certainly seem to be England in the Middle Ages, and some of the characters' thinking struck discordant note.

For instance, Keturah speaks of her "soul's heart" and her "living heart" and implies that if her "living heart" fails to encounter her true love during life, he soul's heart will " long and ache and mourn for eternity." Grandmother offers an equally odd variant on psychological conception when she advises Keturah, "the soul...longs for its mate as much as the body. Sad it is that the body be greedier than the soul." However, her world-view has Christian elements to it. At night she offers prayerful petitions to God and between each petition conceeds, "Thy will."
Yet, she's not exactly Christian in the end either, claiming that "One is greater than death...and that is life."

I quibble a bit. Then as now, folks have head and heart beliefs, mix and confuse orthodox religions and canonical, established types of knowledge with heresies and irrational elements. However, it just seems strange that in a story set at some time in the medieval ages, examining the idea of death, not a single character ever speaks of it from a Christian point of view.

Still, read this book. For the writing. For the romance. It attempts something difficult and succeeds to some degree: while slyly entertaining the reader, it forces him to confront death.