Review By Robin L. Harvey : Tiny Lights for Travellers
Book Review: Tiny Lights for Travellers by Naomi K. Lewis
Tiny Lights for Travellers is an offbeat, uneven memoir about a divorced, middle-aged woman’s thirst for cultural identity. Naomi K. Lewis’s most recent book, a finalist for the 2019 Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction, offers a unique take on a complex subject.
After she discovers a secret diary her grandfather wrote about his 30-day trek across Europe to flee Nazi persecution in the Second World War, Lewis decides to retrace his steps and write about them. The resulting memoir is part journal, part travelogue and part rambling inner monologue about an eclectic range of subjects. She found the diary a year after her husband had asked for a divorce.
Lewis writes she was then overcome by “the fierce longing . . . to get as far from Calgary and the condo as I could, to take Opa’s journal and his map, and to follow it.” The book includes excerpts from her grandfather’s diary juxtaposed with the author’s reflections gleaned as she covered the same terrain. It also contains a map of the journey from Amsterdam to Belgium into France.
However, readers won’t find the words of a woman overwhelmed and shaken by retracing her grandfather’s frightening trip, for Holocaust reflections do not dominate the book, though Lewis considers herself a third-generation Holocaust survivor. In fact, much of the memoir’s content seems out of step with the journey’s harrowing history.
The book includes excerpts from her grandfather’s diary juxtaposed with the author’s reflections gleaned as she covered the same terrain. For example, arriving in Amsterdam, where her grandfather began his trip, Lewis became obsessed with her “giant green backpack.” “Already I regretted the backpack,” she writes. “I’d read online to avoid suitcases if you’re walking, especially on cobblestones; a pack is the way to go. But the green monstrosity doubled my size so that I feared turning and knocking down any child or elderly person in the vicinity.”
The author writes of her many fears. Fears that she’ll get lost because she suffers from DTD (developmental topographical disorientation) , a brain condition where the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex can’t form cognitive maps. Fears about an upcoming meeting with her lover in Brussels. Fears about getting bedbugs, about getting herpes from a public toilet, or getting sick from travel food.
She writes of a European cousin’s friend whom she fears because he offers to escort her though part of the journey, then sends his detailed family tree and suggests she pack a bikini for her visit, signing his correspondence with “Love.” Many parts of the book, including reflections on a friend's suicide, past boyfriends, her strained ex-marriage and musing about a lost scarf, seem only peripherally related to her grandfather’s ordeal.
Yet Lewis writes with such breezy, unaffected honesty and humour, it’s hard not to connect with her and find her endearing. And that’s more than half the battle when writing a memoir.
Lewis does grapple with a conflicted cultural and religious identity, for she feels a strong connection to Judaism despite her secular upbringing and the fact her mother was not Jewish. She only began to explore Jewish traditions when she married a conservative Jewish man. Their impending divorce has left her wondering if, despite herfeelings, is she Jewish at all, or Jewish enough?
Toward the book’s end, she includes a large excerpt from her grandfather’s diary about the final leg of his trek, when he had to cross the Cher river. He nearly drowned because he tried to save some women and a boy who grabbed onto him because they could not navigate the strong current.
“Here was the place it happened. He got out. He went on. And on and on,” Lewis writes, detailing how she ate a meal in France and drank a toast to her grandfather’s success when she hit that milestone. “He would live; he had fifty-nine years still to live. Cheers to that.”
Soon after, Lewis threw her wedding band into the river. She had figured out as much as she could at that point fin the journey. In all, the book is a worth the read, despite the author’s eccentricities, or perhaps because of them. It’s poignant, comical depiction of an insecure woman who hopes if she finds a connection to her roots she will find personal growth is interesting and compelling.
Tiny Lights for Travellers by Naomi K. Lewis, 278 pages, University of
Alberta Press, $29.99