by Alice Nelson
Once on the Cape I dreamed of my mother. In my dream it was dawn and I was alone by the ocean. Constance walked towards me from further up the shore. I can’t remember her face in my dream but I knew it was her. She couldn’t tell me what she knew and I didn’t know what to say to her, but it didn’t matter. We watched the light rise up from behind the water and we kept quiet there together, the morning sun on our faces. We sat there for a long time, not touching but very close.
Acknowledgements
Many hands have guided this work and I am deeply grateful to all those who have helped me in so many ways. Thank you to Brenda Walker, whose friendship, editorial wisdom and enduring belief made all the difference. I am indebted to Ilana Sharp, Catherine Therese, Stephanie Bishop and Leah Kaminsky, who have inhabited the world of this novel with me for many years and whose steadfastness and solidarity made it possible to write it. Thank you to David Carlin for being such splendid and inspirational company for those weeks in France when I was finishing the book. For showing me a way through the story when the path did not seem clear, I am very grateful to Barbara Hewson Bower. Thank you to Peter Bishop for Sibelius, the perfect poem and many other gifts of literary friendship. Enormous thanks are due to Dietra Gamar, who has offered so much to me over so many years since those days in the brownstone in Chelsea. For her unwavering support from the very beginning, I am very grateful to Anne Day. Thank you to Hayley Katzen, Amanda Webster and William Yeoman for their editorial acuity and friendship. Thank you also to Alison Manning for her practical assistance and encouragement, and to Carol Major, novel whisperer and generous soul.
I am enormously grateful to Meredith Curnow for championing this book with such passion, and also to the whole wonderful team at Penguin Random House. Special thanks to Catherine Hill, editor extraordinaire. I am indebted to Emma Paterson at Rogers, Coleridge and White for her unfailing support and belief.
This book was written in many extraordinary houses and some of them have seeped into the story. To all those who have offered me space to write and a quiet room when I most needed it, I am deeply grateful. Thank you to Varuna, the Writers’ House in the Blue Mountains, for various residencies over the years. To Sister Annette Allain and all the Little Sisters of the Assumption, who have always opened their doors and hearts to me in Harlem and Walden, New York. To Lis Sur Mer Artists’ Cottages in Truro, Cape Cod, for the cottage above the dunes. Thanks to John Fanning and Kerry Eielson at La Muse Artists’ and Writers’ Retreat in the Languedoc in France for the gift of space and time in one of the most beautiful parts of the world.
Writing this novel led me into many different worlds and I thank all those who shared their knowledge with me and patiently answered my many questions. My sincere thanks to Rabbi Beryl Epstein for helping me to understand so much about Hasidic life in Crown Heights. Thanks also to Daphne Bondy for all her assistance in Israel; to Blair Nikula for the advice on birds; and to Father Claude Dumas, former national Gitane Chaplain of France, for sharing insights about the culture and history of the Gitane community of France. I am indebted to Jenny and Les Shub for generously sharing their experiences in Israel with me and providing me with a wealth of information, as well as much support and encouragement.
The greatest thanks are due to my family for their enduring love and care and, above all, to Danny, who makes everything possible.
Sources
Many texts were important to me in the research for this novel. I would particularly like to acknowledge Jean Hatzfeld’s books on the Rwandan genocide, Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) and The Antelope’s Strategy: Living in Rwanda After the Genocide (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). The testimonies of the Rwandan genocide survivors included in the novel on pages 195 to 200 are taken directly from Hatzfeld’s recordings of survivors’ stories in these two books.
Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape (Aperture Foundation, 2008), Jonathan Torgovnik’s collection of photographic portraits and testimonies about the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war during the Rwandan genocide was also particularly helpful in my research, as was the comprehensive documentation of the genocide produced by African Rights, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance (1995).
The documentary Children of the Sun (2007) by Ran Tal and the film The Children’s House (2005) by Tamar Feingold were both enormously useful in my research on early life on Israel’s kibbutzim. I have drawn on both these texts to inform this invented narrative, and some of the elements of Dov’s art exhibition are adapted from them.
The allusion to the Australian essayist writing about the love between mothers and children refers to Helen Garner’s reflections on Elizabeth Jolley in her essay ‘Dreams of Her Real Self’, published in the collection Everywhere I Look (Text Publishing, 2016).
Mrs Zelman’s thoughts on the Jewish sabbath are inspired by Abraham Joshua Heschel’s text The Sabbath (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951).
The line of poetry that Jacob quotes in his lecture is from ‘Land in Sight’ by Anne Michaels, originally published in her collection Skin Divers (Bloomsbury, 1999). Thank you to the Wylie Agency, London, for permission to quote this line. The Jose Angel Valente quote is from the poem ‘Be My Limit’, published in Landscape with Yellow Birds: Selected Poems by Jose Angel Valente (Archipelago Books, 2013), translated from the Spanish by Tom Christensen. Grateful thanks to Archipelago Books for permission to use this.
After university in Australia, Alice Nelson lived and worked in Harlem, living in the brownstone on 120th Street in which The Children’s House is set. While studying in New York, she worked at a non-profit agency run by an order of nuns as a case worker with refugee and undocumented migrant families. Alice was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists for her first novel, The Last Sky. The novel also won the TAG Hungerford Award and was shortlisted for the Australian Society of Authors’ Barbara Jefferis Award and for the Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award. Alice’s short fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in publications such as the Sydney Review of Books, the Asia Literary Review, Southerly and the West Australian. Alice now lives in Perth.
Also by Alice Nelson
The Last Sky
After This: Survivors of the Holocaust Speak
A Vintage book
Published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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First published by Vintage in 2018
Copyright © Alice Nelson 2018
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ISBN 9780143791195
Cover photography © Getty Images: image of little boy by Robert Westbrook, Blend Images; brownstone house by iStock
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