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"...emotionally and psychologically immense...The potency of so few words and strokes of paint is unexpected and undeniable".
Preoccupied With My Father (ECW, $19.95) by Simon Schneiderman is almost impossible to write about. This is a book to be experienced. A small book physically, this visual memoir is emotionally and psychologically immense.
Schneiderman's father and mother both escaped the Holocaust, though they each lost most members of their entire families.
A lawyer by profession, Schneiderman spent 20 years teaching himself to paint. Four of the five letters of paint spell pain; it is as if drawing this memoir was the only way that Schneiderman could tell the story of his father's life.
The paintings differ in medium - oil and pencil - and in style. Some look like Chagall's paintings, some look like coloured-in cartoons. Interspersed with the 26 colour images are sparseprose fragments that reveal much in their brevity.
Page 18 shows three figures, a man, a woman, and a child standing on a suitcase. They are haunted, ghostlike figures. Page 19 (opposite the illustration) holds four short lines: "Wed in a DP camp, my parents arrived in Halifax with only one surviving child. The ship was the Protea and it was December 23rd, 1951." Simon is that child.
The prose and images etch the life of Schneiderman's father, Yoel, into our hearts. The brutal repercussions of the war, which resurface throughout Yoel's life, are contained in these pages.
The potency of so few words and strokes of paint is unexpected and undeniable. From young man to father to dying man, Schneiderman evokes his father's spirit.
Mary Jo Anderson is a freelance writer who lives in Halifax.
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