Strikingly unique narrative
Love story between siblings unsettling for the reader, yet ambitious, captivating
After an extended hiatus, acclaimed author Emma Richler returns to the literary spotlight with a sweeping, ambitious new book, Be My Wolff, dedicated to her famous father Mordecai and mother Florence.
It’s been 12 years since the London resident’s bestselling debut novel Feed My Dear Dogs hit shelves, and it’s easy to see why this complex, intricately-crafted work took so long to bring into being.
Be My Wolff centres on the Wolffs, an artistic Russian family in London, and especially on its prized daughter, a gifted girl named Rachel.
After father, Lev, a doting scientist, and mother, Katya, a world-famous choral director, are unable to have more children, they adopt a scrappy young boy from an orphanage, Zachariah, who grows up to become a boxer.
From the start, Rachel and Zach are incredibly close, and in many ways she saves him from despair and helps him cope with the rootlessness of his early years.
As children, the siblings create a picture book, titled Sam the Russian, Lost Tsar of the Prize Ring, His Strange Surprising Adventures, Part One, His Beginnings. It’s inspired by boxing, of course, and it details an imaginary history for Zach, who knows nothing about his biological parents.
The trouble begins when Rachel and Zach are teenagers, and their bond grows too close.
The relationship soon becomes a corrosive force in the tight-knit clan.
By the time the book opens, Rachel and Zach are in love and living in a renovated house in Camden Town, London, and Zach is estranged from their father.
The narrative shifts back and forth in time to tell the familial story, but also overlaps with the elaborate imaginings that Rachel continues to work on, disjointed dream worlds about Zach’s ancestors.
Once one gets past the book’s unsettling premise — a love story between sister and adopted brother — the key characters are compelling, their interactions rich and interestingly written (if a little longwinded).
But the parallel story delineating Zach’s heritage, stretching back centuries and featuring historical figures such as Charles Dickens, proves harder to connect with, and makes this a longer read than it needs to be.
Still, at its best, Be My Wolff is a captivating story, rich with European history, intercontinental travel, boxing trivia, sparkling conversation, Slavic folklore, wolfpack patterns and Russian fairy tales.
A strikingly unique outing. Tara Henley is a writer and radio producer.
Once one gets past the book’s unsettling premise, the key characters are compelling, their interactions rich and interestingly written