The House in Smyrna
Tatiana Salem Levy, translated by Alison Entrekin
Scribe UK, 2015

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he House in Smyrna, written by the Brazilian writer born in Portugal, Tatiana Salem Levy, keeps being relevant to readers due to its unblinking, rather fierce look into what moves us beyond the paralysis of fear. The novel deals with the pain linked to individual and collective memory, introducing the liberating power of the review of the past and writing. The struggle to confront history, the search for solace and the hope for liberation are built into the foundations of this book.

The narrator, a young woman, is paralyzed, alone in her bed with a typewriter and a key to a house in Turkey, Smyrna, her grandfather gave her, appointing her as the person responsible for the inheritance. Four intertwined narratives emerge from her writing, during her search for a physical, mental and emotional recovery. Her paralysis, we learn, is related to her mother’s illness and death, her own passionate and devastating relationship with an ex-boyfriend, the weight of her family’s exile since their forced departure from the family home in Turkey, and the diasporic Jewish history in general. Another exile, beside the one from Turkey to Brazil, haunts her. During the dictatorship in Brazil, her parents fled to Portugal, where the narrator was born.

The strong emphasis on exile and history brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s brilliant text “On the concept of history” (1942). Levy’s narrator performs a historical archaeology, and her inquiry into the past echoes Benjamin’s view that one needs to break history apart in order to reveal, understand, accept and be liberated from trapping roots and the causes of suffering.

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he narrator tells her story in fragments that do not necessarily fit together with the chronological development of past situations or emotions. While certain fragments complement one another, others do not, and these frequent contradictions convey the chaos of a life and a mind. This dynamic reflects the way the narrator’s memory is created and recreated between the community’s recollection and forgetfulness, and her individual memories and interpretations. The birth story told from two angles is an example of contradictions regarding time, exile and birth.

First, the narrator reports that she was born outside Brazil, in exile, in winter, on a cold and gray day. Her mother, she says, went through hours of contraction, without anesthetics, because the baby hadn’t turned around and the anesthetist arrived late. When the baby was born, the finally anesthetized mother couldn’t hold her in her arms. Later, the mother woke up to find a vertical scar that would forever link the gap between her breasts and her pubis.

Following this story, the narrator tells the deceased mother’s imaginary response. Her mother asks her to move the prism of pain, and adds that exile is not necessarily equal to suffering. According to her mother, says the narrator, the day of birth was not cold or gray, and the mother doesn’t have any scar, since it was a natural birth.

Thus, the mythical point of view of the scar of exile and tortured birth giving is interacting with the mother’s imaginary, realistic and pragmatic point of view. The reader is unable to determine whether one narrative has any advantage over the other.

The narrator relives memories of her mother’s love and sage advice, the familiar and intimate—while she also reconstructs the troubled fate of the the past generations of her family and the Jewish people. Ever since her childhood, she has been aware of the discrepancy created by the passage of time. However, suffering, for her, is inter-generational. She feels as if she has spent her entire life in the house in Turkey, the place her family was forced to leave. Adopting this collective memory bestows her with a sense of belonging, of a home, as well as a sense of being exiled forcefully.

The whole range of sensations passes through her body and accumulates into a significant, paralyzing effect she cannot resist. The narrator feels trapped and wishes she could disconnect from the past. Her body is a map on which the past is still happening, accumulating, fragment by fragment, doubt by doubt, pain by pain, preventing her from living the present and delaying her future.

The narrator’s struggle brings to mind Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus”, and Walter Benjamin’s vision of this painting articulates such experience. According to Benjamin, the angel seems to want to get away from something at which he is staring. This “something” is comprised of a chain of past events, a catastrophe piling up ruin upon ruin. The angel, Benjamin says, is tempted to wake the dead and collect the fragments of history; hoping it will liberate him to fly. But a blowing storm from heaven clings to his wings so tightly, he cannot open them. The pile of ruins grows sky-high.

The shards of the narrator’s world, her mother’s illness and death, the narrator’s inability to acknowledge this early death, an abusive ex-boyfriend, a broken heart and the history of exile after exile accumulate as well. It is interesting to observe that her grief carries a heavier emotional load than the pain caused by other reasons. The other storylines recede when the narrator remembers her mother. When she concentrates on this loss, she relinquishes the weight of collective history in favor of the painful the individual past.

Like Klee’s angel, the narrator cannot fly. In order to lift the mass obstructing her way out, she needs to create a tolerable version of the past, a story that will allow her to renew her hope and return to life. Her recollections in writing, however, indicate that the narrator’s struggle to come to terms with the past does not only drain her but also signals hope for a future that goes beyond a heap of ruins. She keeps trying to keep her wings open, even broken, and will fight to fly.

Before the first sign of healing, however, appears a sign of danger. The memory of her suffering during the time she saw her mother dying is not only a memory of pain. She recalls the great happiness of boundless affection and endless intimacy, when the slightest touch or look was a declaration of love. She says that they were so close that, at times, at the hospital, she believed she assimilated her mother’s emotions and experiences. She also comments on how they were physically similar. Her great identification with her mother amounts to an assimilation. Therefore, it is conceivable that, after spending months hugging, caring, touching and interacting in great love with her mother, suffering due to the lethal illness, she craves to maintain the bond, appropriating her mother’s sick body as if it belonged to her, as if the mother were her. The danger here is a brewing death wish, a longing to be one with the mother, still.

When she plunges into pain, though, the narrator hears her mother’s imaginary voice begging her to embrace life and seek happiness. She resists this appeal, speaking of pain as a part of life, a characteristic of her person and a necessity. Apparently, beyond the spontaneous pain, there is a choice in pain. At first, this choice seems to contradict her desire to break the shell of suffering and recover from the paralysis, as the engine of her writing is exactly the emotion that leaves her paralyzed. However, her writing is, potentially, a tool of recovery. She may write to articulate and understand life better, channel her pain, and this way with the burden.

Toward the end of her inner journey, and without giving up the pain, the narrator chooses to keep writing and let it hurt, until the wound becomes a scar, a part of her self that does not cause her paralysis. Hence, her writing opens a door, like a key, clearly related to the key to the house in Turkey. Here, individual and collective memories and pain mix up. The house key becomes a symbol of opening, and gives her a motive to start moving forward.

Without focusing on the actual transition from paralysis to movement, the narrator starts her travel to Turkey. Arriving in the family town, she restrains her hesitation and apprehension and contacts the family elders, who stayed behind despite the danger. They are resentful but speak to her. To her utter shock, they say that the house has already been demolished, and that the family has been aware of this fact. Consequently, she realizes that her grandfather gave her the key in order to send her on a journey to the past, find out the truth, process it and learn a lesson about life. Her perspective widens, now that she is standing where the house used to. She starts questioning the meanings she had assigned to a specific, material, and possibly welcoming house. What exists is the lineage, the story, the tradition. The house takes on a more symbolic sense of a home, and this kind of home cannot be destroyed. The dream of entering this house in order to take root becomes an assimilation of her individual and collective history. Her home exists within a place that is not Brazil, Turkey or Portugal, but outside them and within each one of them.

Interestingly, even after breaking free, the narrator feels that there is pain is in everything, spread to every corner of the planet and every corner of herself. The journey, she declares, has been beautiful, interesting and even funny but it hurts. This inheritance, and everything she carries without choice hurts. Yet, she is able to take control over her life and resists obsession. Now that she writes about all the experiences that led her to her current situation, her writing enables her to open doors, go in and out, in or out, without getting stuck.

The forward movement does not stop. Now that the narrator is moving freely, she travels from Turkey to Portugal, where she experiences a fleeting love story that sustains and satisfies her. Her broken heart is mended to a certain extent, as the body that imprisoned her becomes a tool of release. Moving her body and integrating it into her emotional and mental experiences, helps the narrator accept that life continues despite losses.

The process of recovery continues through all the elements that integrated the haunting past and used to spawn anger, shame, and denial. Her past becomes a fragment of her just as much as she is a fragment of history. She finds, in agreement with Walter Benjamin that the past carries with it a secret index, by which it refers to its own resurrection. The conception of happiness resonates with that of resurrection.