In Her Nature

Britta Santowski is a freelance writer in Victoria, B.C.

This collection of 11 short stories portrays life from a Jewish-lesbian
perspective. While this nonmainstream position suggests an
unconventional viewpoint, the stories themselves are very traditional,
often concluding with a heavy-handed moral. In “A Different Kind of
Love,” for example, the recently widowed Mrs. Faygie Rabinovitch
rediscovers love with another man while at the same time recognizing her
lesbian daughter’s love for a woman as legitimate, albeit different;
the story concludes when Faygie tells the disowned lesbian lover that
she, too, can call her “ma.” Other stories are similarly
predictable. The heroine of “In Her Nature,” a young girl who
“should have been a boy,” encounters all the expected social norms
and barriers but in the end reclaims her true nature. “Canadian
Schmadian” is about—you guessed it—one family’s quest to
preserve Jewish culture in Canada. More successful is “Women Who Make
My Knees Weak,” a delightful exploration of the women who have
influenced the narrator throughout her life; Auntie Rose is definitely a
character to be savored.

As the cover suggests, these are stories of denim and silk. Categories
are polarized and subcategorized instead of dismantled. The butch-femme
cliché goes sadly unchallenged. There is a refreshing blurring of
gender categories in “Love Ruins Everything”; here sexual desires
are unresolved and didacticism is absent. Most of the other stories
disappoint simply because they promise a break from status quo that they
fail to deliver.