A Hero Travels Light

Neil Querengesser taught in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Alberta.

This finely written collection of six tales seems so close to being autobiographical that one wishes almost to call it a memoir rather than fiction. With German, Russian, Jewish, and Catholic roots, Lilly Barnes writes from a unique perspective of one who lived through World Wan II in a place she calls Bergheim, Germany. She was a child with guarded secrets, who found herself without family, friends, or destination in the port of Haifa in 1948, and who now lives in Toronto and seeks through her writing to piece together her past. These tales, all inthe first person, recall, through an effective mingling of past and present — and, perhaps, fact and fiction — various significant events in the narrator’s life as she comes to terms with the facts of her uprootedness and displacement.

One has a sense of listening to, rather than reading, these tales, so strong is the conversational voice throughout. The people whom she brings to life so vividly in these pages provide sudden surprises and insights for the narrator, whether these insights result from direct conversations with these characters, or whether they result from the resifting and restructuring of private childhood memories. The events may be as domestic as a visit to Canada from her old nursemaid, or as dramatic as the story of the narrator’s relocation from Bergheim to an Israeli kibbutz. The characters range from a crazy old woman with some secrets of her own in “Behind the Second Door” to the ambiguously heroic soldier nicknamed Tibby, whose ties with the British army and whose guerrilla heroics during the establishment of the state of Israel seem to point to him as the well-known figure of the contemporary Middle East that the narrator claims him to be. By committing her memories of these various people to paper, Barnes is able to preserve them in an unchanging environment, something obviously lacking in her early life. The tales are intensely personal, yet they move beyond the merely personal to a moving glimpse of life for so many in the post-war years.