Etty Greenberger is a remarkable baby. She is born with a shock of bright red hair — the only redhead in her family — and cries incessantly months after infants typically recover from colic. The only child of Holocaust survivors, Etty grows up with a mind of her own in a Hasidic home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. So begins Talya Jankovits’s debut novel, The Very Unremarkable Life of Mrs. Etty Bloom. As the title implies, Etty’s adult years will not continue in a remarkable fashion.
Much has been written about Holocaust trauma that has plagued survivors and their families, even generations after the war. Etty’s parents both try to shield their daughter from that trauma and hope for a calm and peaceful life for their family of three. Yet Jankovits writes a poignant scene in which Etty notices that her parents both have tattooed numbers on their arms and decides she will write a number on hers with marker. When her parents realize what she’s done, her father is mortified while her mother breaks out in laughter and subsequently never lets Etty forget where she came from.
In third grade, Etty tries to impress her best friend, Elke, by throwing a snowball at a boy their age, knocking off his glasses. Her parents are embarrassed that their daughter behaved this way toward another human being. At dinner that evening, her father chastises her, “Hashem will remember this heinous act. And you will too. That will be your punishment Etty, you will never be able to forget what you did to this boy. It will haunt you. It will haunt you and remind you to be kind.”
Etty later concludes that her father had put a curse on her that evening. What follows was Etty’s so-called unremarkable life as an adult. When her mother and a renowned shadchan or matchmaker try to arrange a shidduch, Etty refuses match after match. When she finally settles down and becomes Mrs. Bloom, she is a good decade older than most Hasidic brides in their community. As Mrs. Bloom, Etty takes on many of her mother’s concerns, becoming focused on arranging a marriage for her daughter, Sarah.
Jankovits’s first book was a collection of poetry, and her background as a poet shines through her prose in this novel. She writes with great empathy and seamlessly incorporates everyday Hasidic customs in her story. And while many of the characters — Etty’s husband Benji, her mother-in-law, an elderly Italian neighbor, to name a few — may first appear as mismatched family and friends, they prove time and again that they’re loyal and positive influences in Etty’s life.
Through her storytelling, Jankovits has posed a number of questions, namely, what does it mean to be remarkable and is a life filled with love and family enough? For Etty, as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, the answer is clear.
Susan Blumberg-Kason is a memoirist and biographer and co-editor of an anthology set in Hong Kong. She is a regular contributor to the Asian Review of Books and World Literature Today. She became interested in 1930s Shanghai when she was in the city in the mid-1990s for her thesis research. Susan now lives with her family in the Chicago suburbs.
