Publishers Weekly
09/04/2023
In this intermittently thought-provoking compendium, Varon (Drawing to an Inside Straight), a professor emeritus of English at Eastern Oregon University, brings together interconnected essays exploring the vagaries of historical memory. The through line of the collection is Varon’s quest to uncover the story of Esta Plat, the childhood friend Varon’s grandmother, Susha, left behind in Ratne, Ukraine, after immigrating to the U.S. in the early 20th century to escape antisemitic persecution. Lamenting the ways that heritage is lost to history through violence, Varon notes that Esta’s letters to Susha stopped arriving in 1942 after Nazis massacred “all but a handful” of Ratne’s Jewish population. The author suggests erasure also happens through more benign means, regretfully noting that she impulsively threw out decades of correspondence between Susha and Esta while helping Susha move in 1965: “What might mean to our diminished family, shocked and stunned into silence in a time warp that tried every day to erase each year before 1945?” Though Varon finds bittersweet poetry in the unknowability of her grandmother’s friend, she never quite arrives at a thesis, and the selections straying from the author’s investigation into Esta’s story feel out of place. This has its moments, even as Varon struggles to bring the various threads together. (Sept.)
author of From the Annals of Kraków - Piotr Florczyk
As the author reminds us in essay after essay in this stunning collection, the past is often 'masked, throttled, suppressed,' but it never goes away. This is true for Holocaust and domestic violence survivors alike but especially so for their descendants, who, even decades after the events, continue to seek ways to transform generational grief and longing into a way forward.Accompanying Jodi Varon while she strives to uncover her past’s reach and meaning is an unforgettable journey.
author of Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today - Melissa Kwasny
A profound account of the author’s visits to Holocaust memorial sites in Eastern Europe and Israel, a fascinating family story of migration and tragedy embedded in the larger history of catastrophic world events, a generous introduction to Jewish practices for the secular reader, Jodi Varon’s series of connected essays, Your Eyes Will Be My Window, is also a daughter and granddaughter’s quest for answers to some of the most crucial questions of our time: How do we remember those who died of violence? How do we overcome the fear of 'fantastical harm' that comes with generational trauma? How do we live with scars both visible and invisible?
author of In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country - Kim Barnes
Witness, voyeur, and provocateur, Jodi Varon doesn’t shy from the visceral realities of the people she meets on her mythic journey, whether in the present or the distant past. Part heartbreaking history, part plaintive imagining, the essays in this beautifully interwoven collection detail a quest for meaning and identity in the face of violence, dislocation, and profound loss. By turns unabashedly sacred and fearlessly profane, viscerally intimate and informed by the grim determinism of Old-World fairy tales, Varon’s lyrical observations, reflections, and confessions act as a vivisection on the body of memory.
