HOW YOU LOVE YOUR DAUGHTER, by Hila Blum. Translated by Daniella Zamir.
A woman travels thousands of miles to spy on a family at the beginning of Hila Blum’s “How to Love Your Daughter.” Alone on a dark road, Yoella watches the family through their lit windows. Inside are her daughter Leah and her two granddaughters, but they don’t know she’s outside: Yoella hasn’t seen Leah in years and has never met her granddaughters.
For six years, Leah has called her mother sporadically from all over the world, “from Dharamsala, Bangalore, Hanoi, Chiang Mai. Everything is fine, she is fine.” She climbs mountains, sleeps in forests, visits remote villages. Except that Leah actually lived in the Netherlands all along, with the husband and daughters she never mentioned to her mother, and that her nomadic existence was a fabrication. Yoella and her husband “are the parents of a missing person, but the kind that no one around us can understand, not even us.”
To understand the mystery of Leah’s disappearance, Yoella takes a ruthless look back at her past. She puts herself on trial as a mother, calling witnesses, digging into the evidence, looking for a crime. Her tone is ruthless, with the reader in the position of judge. But as it becomes clear that Yoella has been an affectionate, kind, capable mother, the reader gets closer to a co-defendant: if she’s guilty of causing harm, then maybe we are too.
‘How to Love Your Daughter’ is Hila Blum’s second novel and her American debut, in a vibrant, vivid translation from the Hebrew by Daniella Zamir, and it’s a stone-cold masterpiece of psychological suspense. Often the sentences are deceptively clear, transparent and menacing like a swarm of jellyfish. Elsewhere the tone changes to humour, even silliness. What ties the two disparate registers, and everything in between, together is unfailing authenticity: every observation, every gesture, every bit of dialogue rings true.
In Blum’s prose, the often unseen duties of caring are fraught with mystery and foreboding. Unwilling to let her teenage daughter ride the bus alone from their home in Jerusalem to her dance rehearsals, Yoella waits for Leah outside in the cold parking lot. “As she leaves the building two hours later, her thin silhouette flickers on and off in the misty headlights of passing cars, and when I start the engine and the lights flash, she picks up her pace and with every step she takes towards me, her body flows away from the dance.”
Leah is vibrant on the page, appearing as a baby, a toddler, a child, and a teenager as the short sections of the novel progress through time. Yoella loves her daughter dearly. She takes Leah on trips to Europe, just the two of them: “In Rome, at lunch, I let her take a sip of my cocktail and then I took two more myself, and we talked non-stop and roared with laughter, people turned to stare.”
When Leah begins to worry about her appearance, Yoella teases her by saying, “It’s a lost cause.” Do not pay attention to your birthmark and your pores, but to your nose? I don’t see a solution for that.” Throughout the novel, the bond between mother and daughter grows stronger, making Yoella’s loss almost unbearable. What will she do now that she knows where her daughter is?
As “How to Love Your Daughter” races toward a reckoning, the intrigue and revelations are dramatic enough to be completely satisfying. By the final pages, I held my breath, desperate to find out if Yoella will be sentenced to a life without her daughter, or if she will be pardoned.
Flynn Berry is the author of ‘Northern Spy’, ‘A Double Life’ and ‘Under the Harrow’.
HOW YOU LOVE YOUR DAUGHTER | By Hila Blum | Translated by Daniella Zamir | 272 pp. | Riverhead Books | $27
