You Are Not What We Expected
by Sidura Ludwig
Astoria, £12.99
Reviewed by Karen Skinazi
In her novel, Disobedience, Naomi Alderman’s North-West London is full of “respectable women who spend their lives driving Volvos between Kosher King and Hasmonean”. Eve Harris’s NW women in The Marrying of Chani Kaufman have “worn-out wombs” and “mousy wigs”. Francesca Segal’s characters are trapped, “held in orbit by the hot sun of the community. . . Such was the way in Jewish north-west London,” as the narrator of The Innocents relates.
Jewish North-West London, we might surmise, is not the most exciting place on earth. Yet through these works of fiction, it has become a vivid part of contemporary cultural and literary imagination.
I grew up in Thornhill, a place a lot like North-West London: quiet, “respectable,” very Jewish. Thornhill sits just north of Toronto, and, no one has bothered to turn its shuls and kosher supermarkets into powerful prose — until Sidura Ludwig, a Winnipeg-born member of Birmingham’s Central Synagogue, wrote You Are Not What We Expected.
Through a series of connected but non-linear stories, Ludwig immerses readers in the lives of the Levine family. We also meet their neighbours, classmates, classmates’ nannies, café servers, and various other residents of Thornhill.
But none of these is the hero, or anti-hero, of the book—Thornhill itself is the hero. Poor Rina, who hails from Australia and works at the kosher Second Cup wonders: “Was this crazy, insular neighbourhood so inward-looking it could see right through her?” Difficult, stubborn Isaac moves to Thornhill after a lifetime as a “Wandering Jew”. Through his international gaze, we see the smallness of Thornhill, its refusal to accept its smallness. “Have you been to LA? New York? Their kosher communities would eat yours for breakfast,” he taunts.
Ludwig, with her own, similarly cosmopolitan stance, paints a sharp picture of this north-of-the-city suburb in which domestic dramas unfold in economic yet imagistic language (Elaine’s panic is described, in one scene, “like a clothes-dryer cycling up, the high-pitched whirl of a spin that will tumble everything until it blends together and the sum is indistinguishable from its parts”).
We read of Filipina nannies who have left their own children behind to tend to spoilt Canadian children. We linger in Canadian and Israeli chain coffee shops —Tim Hortons, Second Cup, Aroma —life-changing moments can occur. We watch kids confined in their bedrooms playing Minecraft and mums playing Mah-jong, people transitioning from secular to religious or female to male.
There are mothers and daughters who can’t see eye-to-eye, brothers and sisters on separate trajectories, wives who have lost their husbands. There is a whole world in Thornhill. And Sidura Ludwig has captured it.
Dr Karen Skinazi is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol
