Geata Póeg na Déanainn

Outside the frame September 26, 2020

Adèle Geras’s children’s book, The Girls in the Velvet Frame, has been one of my very favourites since I was eight or nine years old and plucked it off a shelf in my local public library. Over the past few months, I’ve been revisiting a lot of these old favourites, as their gentle familiarity has been comforting and nourishing during the stress of the pandemic. I have to say that this book in particular holds up really, really well: it was published in 1978, I first read it in the mid-’90s, and it remains the same warm, kind, hopeful story. It’s the literary equivalent of a soft, heavy blanket or a bowl of hot soup.

The book is a gentle piece of children’s historical fiction — the story of a widowed Jewish mother and her five daughters, struggling to get by in genteel poverty in 1913 Jerusalem. Each daughter — shy thirteen-year-old Rifka, who has long shouldered a parent-like responsibility in the family, cynical eleven-year-old Chava, sensitive, bookish, romantic eight-year-old Naomi, fastidious six-year-old Dvora, and mischievous three-year-old Shoshie — is carefully drawn, and the reader gets a strong sense not just of their individual personalities, but how they fit into the family dynamic. The result is a quiet, meandering story which reads as both a vivid picture of a specific time and place, and also a series of evocative portraits of the people who inhabit its pages.

There are three narrative threads running through the story: the first steps towards Rifka’s arranged marriage (she and David, the boy in question, are unbelievably shy, and their slow courtship, under the watchful eyes of both of their respective families, is adorably awkward), the girls’ glamorous unmarried aunt Mimi rekindling an old love affair with Max, a man she knew back in her younger, wilder days (the scandal being that he’s a Christian), and the sisters’ and Mimi’s attempt to track down the girls’ older brother Isaac, who travelled to New York to seek his fortune, and vanished without so much as a letter, causing anguish and heartbreak for his mother. Each of these threads is carefully and exquisitely written, woven beautifully with the quiet, everyday lives of the family. I was struck, on rereading the book, how busy the sisters and their mother Sarah always were: all their conversations and emotional moments take place simultaneously with incidental pieces of work: peeling vegetables, boiling water, mending clothing or planning the evening meal. Even at rest, their hands are constantly working. (Mimi’s house, in contrast, is an oasis of repose, like a tiny jewellery box filled with sugared almonds and Turkish Delight — is it any wonder the girls love to visit?)

In truth, The Girls in the Velvet Frame is a celebration of the quiet, powerful, ordinary lives and work of girls and women: cooking, cleaning, caring for smaller children, stretching every last penny (there’s lots of discussion of hand-me-down dresses, bathing in the kitchen so as not to waste hot water, and so on). This work is at the heart of the story, and is given the dignity and primacy that it would have had (and still does have) in millions of similar women’s lives. The book is also a celebration of community and neighbourliness, vividly depicting the networks of care and obligation stretching outside a single household, and, indeed, across oceans. In our current circumstances, we could do with being reminded of the value and beauty and power of this sense of community as much as possible!