After an eclectic career as a pharmacist, music coach, pianist, linguist and poet, Saskatonian Martha Blum sat down to write her first novel.
The Walnut Tree was published in 1999 when Blum was 86, and it won best first book at the Saskatchewan Book Awards.
Seven years later, Blum has tenderly taken up the threads of this story and produced its sequel. The Apothecary won best fiction in Saskatchewan last November.
Like The Walnut Tree, The Apothecary is clearly based on fact. The protagonist of the story, Felix Geller, is a Jewish pharmacist living in Czernowitz, Romania, in 1940, struggling to survive the horrors of war and the threat of liquidation.
Blum herself was born in Czernowitz, then part of Austria, in 1913, managing to complete an extensive post-secondary education and begin her pharmacy career before the Russian invasion of 1940 and the subsequent German invasion a year later.
Following internment in the Czernowitz Ghetto, she made her way to Canada in 1951, eventually settling in Saskatoon where she continues to live. Felix's journey follows a similar path, and the way in which Blum describes it demands the full attention of the reader.
Riveting
Her prose is riveting but unconventional, her characterizations, pacing and narrative arc reflective of an old-world style and sentimentality.
At the outset of the narrative Felix saves the life of a young family friend, Shainah, entrusting her to a parish priest, whom she later marries.
Felix then escapes into the Caucasian Mountains, making his way at war's end to Vienna where countless Czernowitzers, now homeless, gathered. There, "exiles looked for one another, strangers became friends with the first glass of wine. And stories of mass murder, personal accounts of rescue, as well as unimaginable images of cruelty coloured this first day."
In Vienna, Felix is reunited with his childhood sweetheart, who is now married to a former member of the German Einsatzgrappen killing squads. Here Blum blurs the lines between good and evil, boldly toying with questions of guilt, forgiveness and basic morality.
In Vienna, Felix's life also intersects indirectly with that of Shainah's. While this is very much a novel about the Holocaust, the camps, cattle cars and even the cruelty remain cloistered in the background.
The focus is not so much on the events but on the way in which knowledge of the events shaped the people. This novel is, in fact, less a story about war and more a story about survival and the particular way in which ordinary people strive to remain human -- to love, to lust, to remember and to move forward in life.
