High comedy amid sober realization
You Are Not What We Expected Sidura Ludwig Anansi
His name is Isaac. He's 72 years old and has the kind of explosive temperament that delights in making “scenes” whenever his values are affronted. We get an exhilarating example of this in the opening pages of this novel. Are we seeing him at his worst or at his most heroic? That's part of his fascination.
Author Sidura Ludwig describes him as “elderly, short, inconspicuous” — but here he is, creating such an uproar at a Jewish school in Toronto that the beleaguered principal becomes convinced of the need to upgrade security.
Isaac has been horrified to discover that the flag of Israel is flying below Canada's flag on the school grounds. Given that this insult is happening on the birthday of the state of Israel, his wrath knows no bounds. And although Isaac will be escorted gently but firmly off the property, he is not finished. A wrong must be corrected. What happens will leave the reader smiling.
Ludwig is adept at setting up such moments of high comedy, but sobering strands also run through her book. She had originally contemplated it as a novel, but then saw the possibilities of a collection of short stories in which various characters and narrative threads mesh into a rich and rewarding tapestry. And although it focuses on the diverse Jewish community in Toronto's Thornhill neighbourhood, its vision extends beyond boundaries of ethnicity and religion.
This volume can claim kinship with Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio, Alice Munro's Who Do You Think You Are and Margaret Laurence's A Bird in the House, works in which interconnected stories provide a vessel for examining the human comedy in its often troubling complexity.
Isaac, who has returned to Canada after years in sunny California to help his sister care for a pair of difficult grandchildren, becomes the most endearing among a richly realized gallery of characters.
Ludwig doesn't sentimentalize their world and she has an eye for the absurdities of human behaviour in even the most poignant of circumstances. But there's compassion in her intimate examination of these lives.