The award-winning novel which asks: 'What happens when parents get things wrong?' - The Jewish Chronicle

As a parent, every day is fraught with choices. What they should wear or eat, how to deal with their tantrums or get them to sleep, and, later how to help them navigate friendships or relationships.

But are there consequences of those seemingly small judgments? Could a single one create a ripple effect?

That’s the question behind Hila Blum’s award-winning novel English-language debut How to Love your Daughter, which follows Yoella, grappling with a prolonged estrangement from her child.

Once so close, why are they strangers now? What led Leah to have children herself and yet not tell her mother, leaving Yoella, as Blum puts it, having “granddaughters without being their grandmother”. What did she get wrong?

Blum started considering the subject when her own daughter was seven; she is now 19. As a relatively new parent, she was struck by what seemed like an infinite number of daily decisions demanded by parenting.

“Some were tiny, of course, and some were enormous, but always decisions, decisions.

"And of course we operate based on our world knowledge and our instincts. I was struck by the impossibility of predicting the accumulated long-term effect of all the decisions.”

Most parents, she suggests, are well-intentioned, driven by what they believe to be right. “Yet they can still sometimes arrive at doing the wrong thing. I was concerned by the potential of benign intentions to lead to negative outcomes, because there’s such an abundance of blind spots for us.”

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Blum's book (Photo: Bookcover)

For Blum, a book editor who writes in her spare time, the novel was therapeutic. “It was sort of a vessel for my fears,” she says. “I set down to write a novel about the damage that can be done even when we try to do our best in caring for our children.”

The book, Blum’s second novel, interrogates the reliability of memory. “We all have been first-hand witnesses to our childhood,” she says, but the stories we tell “have necessarily undergone a great deal of mediation and processing and editing”, whether intentionally or otherwise.

As the cliché goes, we can never really know the truth of what’s going on in other people’s lives. But, says Blum, “in many ways we also don’t know enough about our lives”. There’s this tension between “the emotional cargo” we carry and the narratives we tell ourselves.

After mulling it for years, Blum found her starting point: Yoella observing her grandchildren from the shadows.

She stresses that Yoella and Leah’s story is not her own; both are only children, whereas Blum has three siblings and her daughter has two half-brothers. But she is intrigued by the relationship between parent and only child, where “no one except the two of them can provide a version of what happened”.

For siblings, there may be disagreement about the past, but there is someone there to decipher it with you. With only children “there’s no one else to help settle any disputes”.

The book has been hotly discussed in book clubs in Israel, with readers interpreting it differently.

"My sympathies lay initially more with Leah, wishing to escape her mother’s sometimes suffocating presence, but a late twist changed how I understood their separation. And yet, is Yoella a reliable narrator?

“She’s telling her truth,” says Blum. “It’s not like she’s deceiving the reader, but maybe she is deceiving herself in certain aspects. She has many blind spots.

"And it’s for the readers to see how aware or unaware she is about what she’s telling us.”

The author has enjoyed hearing people take sides, although she is tight-lipped about where her sympathies lie. “Reactions to the characters about their motivations have been so incredibly varied,” she says.

hila2. photographer - Omer Armoni

Hila Blum (Photo: Omer Armoni)

“For every reaction I’ve heard the complete opposite. There are readers who perceive the mother is above all extremely devoted, extremely caring, and accordingly they perceive the daughter as ungrateful.

"At the same time there are readers who perceive the mother to be horrible, an egotistical mother to an unfortunate daughter who rightly ran away from her.”

At one point, Yoella observes “I miss the early days of motherhood and seek them out”. As the mother of two pre-school children, I ask Blum whether she thinks toddler days take less of an emotional toll?

“I don’t think you could talk about it in terms of more or less difficult,” she says.

“In the first years you’re more autonomous because there’s much less consulting with your child. You just operate. As this child grows into a full-blown person and personality you have to take so many more things into account.”

She considers the question further. “For myself as a child, that might be pretty accurate. I think I made more trouble when I was a teenager than as a younger child, but I couldn’t say that about just anyone.”

What she is sure about — and as the book illustrates through Yoella’s complex relationship with her emotionally detached mother — is the extent to which our own parents shape the ones we become “whether we try to imitate them or whether we repudiate their ways."

She says: “No matter how hard we try to tell ourselves we are liberated from our upbringing to invent our own parenthood, we are never really liberated”.

The book won the prestigious Israeli literary Sapir Prize in 2021, an accolade previously taken by the likes of David Grossman and Etgar Keret. It’s given her a wide audience.

“In the week after winning the prize, the number of emails, posts, voicemails and messages and texts and WhatsApps I got was higher than in the preceding ten years,” she says.

“I was overwhelmed, it was very nice.”

Blum, who started her career in journalism, lives in Jerusalem. Unusually for an Israeli novel, How to Love Your Daughter contains almost nothing to identify the setting as Israel, bar a brief reference to army service. This is book about the personal, certainly not the political.

“The core of our existence is practised through relationships and family relationships are among the most fascinating we’ll encounter,” she says.

Hila Blum (Photo: Copyright Unknown)

“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between cultures. The global village, it’s not just a figure of speech.

"Adolescents all over the world inhabit the same social networks, and parents all over the world tackle parenting predicaments and draw on similar sources of information.

"So writing about a specific family is almost inevitably also touching on the universal.”

A touch defiantly, she says as an Israeli, her experience is as much about family life as anything else. “Being an Israeli is not only about politics. It’s about the conventions of family and child upbringing, so for me this book is absolutely Israeli.”

In fact, the book has resonated outside of Israel more than she ever thought it would. “ I thought I was writing something so intimate. Only when it came out did I realise how universal it is.”

‘How to Love Your Daughter’, by Hila Blum, translated by Daniella Zamir, is out now

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