Please welcome Uvi Poznansky who is a diverse and talented author. She has also become a good friend.
Tell us a little about yourself.
I am an author, poet and artist. I paint with my pen and write with
my paintbrush, which means that my art always tells a story, and my
writing is highly visual and sensual. I earned my M.A. in Architecture
from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and my M.S. degree in Computer
Science from the University of Michigan. I write across a variety of
genres: literary fiction, historical fiction, biblical fiction, dark
fantasy, poetry, and children’s books.
Tell us about your new series, Still Life with Memories.
In my debut novel Apart from Love,
I described a son, Ben, who comes back home, rebels against his father,
and reveals a family secret: his mother, Natasha, previously a renown
pianist, had succumbed to Early-Onset Alzheimer. My new novel, The Music
of Us, takes Natasha a generation back, to the beginning of WWII, when
she falls in love with her future husband, Lenny.
The story is told by Lenny. In 1970, he can no longer deny that his
wife is undergoing a profound change. Despite her relatively young age,
her mind succumbs to forgetfulness. Now, he goes as far back as the
moment he met Natasha, when he was a soldier and she—a star, brilliant
yet illusive. Natasha was a riddle to him then, and to this day, with
all the changes she has gone through, she still is.
Do you break the rules when you write?
I sure do! You know how you’re taught to write languages that are
not too long, so the reader doesn’t get lost in them? Well, that’s not
always the way we talk. Some people just string one sentence into
another, creating free associations without putting a period in between,
barely taking time to breathe. This is what I am exploring with Natasha,
who at this point in the story is a vibrant teenager who has more to
say than time to say it:
I asked Natasha if she got my photograph, the one I had sent
earlier that month. It showed me among others in a group of Marines,
all of us dressed in uniforms, looking exactly alike.
She said yes, and was I the Marine second from the left, squatting,
and in return I should expect a photograph of hers, which I’d better
treat with extreme care, not the way I had treated her first envelope,
which meant placing it in a dry, safe place, preferably close to my
heart, because this is the earliest picture she had with her papa, so it
was dear to her, and she’s giving it to me as a special gift, and on an
entirely different note, what would I say if she told me that this
summer she plans to take some time off from performances, which would
give us an opportunity to meet, and even if her Mama would object to
this idea, because she protects her only daughter from dates with men,
and with soldiers in particular, because in her opinion they’re
good-for-nothing low-lives who sleep who-knows-where with God-knows-who,
she, Natasha, would love to see me if—and that’s a big if—I could
arrange a visit.
Give us another example of breaking the rules using sentences that go on for the duration of a full paragraph.
Sure! Here is another example, with old Uncle Shmeel who is an old
bachelor so eager for a conversation that he can’t stop talking:
I raised my hand for a farewell handshake, as I had to catch the
last train out of town, but according to Uncle Shmeel, the conversation
had only begun, so why rush it?
And without losing a beat he started telling me, between one
momentous blow and another, that thirty years after it was written, this
rhythm was used for the letter V in Morse code, and therefore it
would surely come to represent the notion of victory, thanks in part to
the BBC, because since the beginning of this war it had started to
preface its broadcasts with those four notes, played on drums, but if
you would ask him—which for some reason, no one cared to do—he could
give it more punch, not only because the clarinet had the largest ranges
of pitch of all musical instruments but also because no other Kleismer could hope to come close to the way he played it, which might sound like bragging but really, it wasn’t.
You can hear it for yourself, can’t you? Dit-dit-dit-dah!
At this point Uncle Shmeel smoothed his hair over his bald spot and
took a long, deep breath, which allowed him to go on explaining that at
any rate, this new interpretation of the symphony would have surprised
the composer himself, as did the other, more common interpretation,
which was based on the rumor that he, Beethoven, had pointed to the
beginning of the first movement and said, “Thus fate knocks at the
door.”
Fascinating as that might have sounded it was completely wrong,
nothing more than a fancy myth, but no one but Beethoven could have
refuted it, which he had neglected to do, perhaps on account of being
deaf, or mad, or both. And the truth was entirely different, you see,
and much plainer. It was not the idea of fate that had inspired him, nor
was it Morse code, rather it was the song of a yellow-hammer bird,
which he had heard—penetrating, somehow, the heavy silence in his
ears—while walking in Prater park in Vienna, which had been free to the
public thanks to a declaration, a regal decree dating back to 1766 by
Emperor Joseph II. And to make a short story long, the
conclusion—dit-dit-dit-dah!—the conclusion is this: when two ideas
compete for popular attention, fate would always get the upper hand,
especially when its rival is merely a songbird.
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By Rhaevyn Hart
‘That was chutzpa, plain and simple’, August 21, 2015
