Birdsong in varied voices
The Yellow Bird Sings
Jennifer Rosner Picador, £14.99
Sound, and the absence of it, is a major theme in the life of Jennifer Rosner. Her 2011 memoir, If a Tree Falls, charted the challenges of bringing up her two deaf daughters in a “hearing, speaking world”, and traced her family history, imagining the lives of those ancestors who also could not hear. The Yellow Bird Sings, her debut novel, is in a sense inspired by the memoir — and by real stories of Holocaust survivors. It deals with the opposite of the concerns of If a Tree Falls: What happens when you need to keep a child quiet and not making a sound?
The child in question is Shira; the need for silence is because, when the novel opens, she and her mother Roza are living concealed in a sympathetic Polish farmer’s barn. It is 1941; the rest of the family is already lost, and Roza will do anything to keep her daughter safe — even if it means losing her.
This not a new story, and in the early pages I wondered why this book needed to be written; there are so many tragic and true stories to be told. Rosner’s way of storytelling is melodic and slow. Impressive passages descend into flowery description, notably of the movements of the imaginary yellow bird that guides Shira through her darkest times. But, gradually, the pace picks up and the story develops in more original and interesting ways. Roza’s journey — in the woods, in the shadows, within a partisan camp — is improbable and implausible, but what story about Holocaust survival, true or fictional, isn’t? As the book shifted into a dual narrative, with mother and daughter separated for the duration of the war, I found myself racing to the conclusion. And if some of the narrative is simplistic and predictable — the depiction of the kindly nuns who help Shira, and the introduction of her majestic musical talent that transforms her future — the central pull of the relationship between mother and daughter is plausible, painfully so:
“To be alone, even on the run, even in grave danger — yet without that extra needy weight, that other body on hers — was liberating.” I defy any parent not to get shivers as they read of the powerful and impossible nature of a love that can also be a burden. Although The Yellow Bird Sings is a far from perfect book, I cannot shake this poignant tale from my mind.
Although it is a far from perfect book, I cannot shake this tale from my mind