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House on the River
Nessa Rapoport. Harmony Books: 2004 (hardcover). ISBN: 1400048877. 160 pages.
read an excerpt
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Note From the Author
Imagine if, in the middle of your life, you were given the chance to relive your childhood, but only the sweetest, most beautiful parts. That is what happened to me.
One August, I rented a houseboat to travel through the blue lakes and stone canals of Ontario, Canada, with my children, mother, uncle and aunt. Our destination was a small town where we had spent dreamy summers of reading and reverie in an old house on a green river.
After the trip, I resumed my work on a novel whose heroine and sister were having a cataclysmic fight. No matter how I tried, I could not sort out precisely why they were at war. Meanwhile, the days grew shorter, but the serenity and grace of that week on water lingered, the way the last light of a summer evening still hovers in the sky. House on the River became the book I had to write next.
What did I learn from the journey? I discovered the art of saying good-bye well-to a beloved place and to the people who shaped me, especially my remarkable grandmother. I could honor my childhood friend Rose, with whom I can "swoop from grand abstractions to tips on streaking our hair."
Finally, this memoir is an ode to reading. In my family, the desirability of a book is measured by the degree of sleep deprivation one is willing to suffer in order to reach the last page. There is no higher tribute than "I stayed up all night to finish it."
I became a writer because when I read my mother a high school essay about a lonely man on one side of the city and an equally lonely man across town, she cried. I saw her tears and knew I had found my calling.
And so, if you cry while reading this book, I'll consider it a complete success. And if you stay up all night and cry, we're related by blood!
Questions for Discussion
1. If you could choose one memory from your past to preserve, what would it be?
2. How have you reconciled with the "unfinished business" of childhood-mother, father, siblings?
3. In what ways can you reinterpret the story of your past to give it a different ending?
4. Can you trace the transmission of memory across generations in your family?
5. Did you leave the city of your birth for another kind of life?
6. Do you have a friend from childhood with whom you have been able to maintain a friendship, despite distance and difference? What role do your friendships play in the face of inevitable loss-and celebration?
7. A reader of House on the River commented that "everyone has a summer place." Perhaps summer is a state of mind that can persist even when the physical place is no longer part of our lives. What was your summer place? Have you, as an adult, been able to recreate the feeling of having all the time in the world?
About the Author
NESSA RAPOPORT is the author of a novel, Preparing for Sabbath, and a collection of prose poems, A Woman’s Book of Grieving. Her essays and stories have been published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Forward and have been widely anthologized. Her column, “Inner Life,” appears in The Jewish Week. She was awarded a grant by the Canada Council for the Arts for House on the River.
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