Rings in a Tree
by Maja Kriel
(Kwela)
With elegance and insight, Maja Kriel skilfully evokes the lives of three generations of a Jewish family.
She begins with Chava, later called Eva, born in a remote Polish village, and the natural leader of all the local children, both Jewish and other. At the end of her life, deaf and silent, she is still the uncompromising “fierce desert princess”, “pure and clean” despite the life she survived. When her sister disgraces the family they flee to Warsaw, and then to London.
It is here that Eva learns to sew, the skill that enables her to survive another move to Kimberley where she finds that her soft young husband, whom she has come out to join, has died. The next generation is represented mainly by Eva’s son, Max, spoiled and talented, and his wife, Hannah, herself a refugee from Russia.
By then the family is established in Johannesburg where Max is an architect in the new city, which he loves, and Hannah is a musician and singer.
Then comes Amy, probably the same generation as Kriel. Although the book is full of the lives of women, they all revolve around Max, and Amy in particular is able to resist his dismissive domination. She says: “It is remarkable how I found things to like in myself when I began to hate my father.”
Though this is called a novel, it reads like a family memoir. Kriel’s focus is interior, personal, domestic, asserting the strength of family ties, but in no way romanticising them as she takes a close look at the dynamics of marriages and parent-child relationships.
She maintains an integrity of purpose from the outset, painting the earlier lives and later, childhood and old age, with the same dispassionate affection and precise detail. Dialogue is especially well rendered in this wonderfully satisfying read.