your mouth is lovely

Its title taken from a Russian Jewish saying pronounced over a child speaking her first words, Nancy Richler’s novel Your Mouth Is Lovely brings to life a tiny Russian Jewish village of the early twentieth century and the brutal imprisonment that socialist agitators were subjected to by the imperial government.

The storyteller is a young mother, Miriam, 23 years old and already jailed in Siberia for six years. The story is her memoir in the form of a letter to her six-year-old daughter, who was taken away from her at birth. It starts with the painful circumstances of Miriam’s birth and abandonment by her superstitious mother. She’s raised at first by a family friend and then by her father and stepmother after they marry.

Miriam’s village sits between a pine forest and a vast marsh that locals are drawn to even while it frightens them and fuels their belief in a malevolent supernatural. Most of the characters are women, and they are both superstitious and smart, judgmental and kind. Richler controls the potential sprawl of the plot and settings by staying focused on the details seen through Miriam’s eyes. Her stepmother satisfyingly evolves from a young wife who doesn’t particularly want Miriam in her home to a stern, loving, and steadfast mother.

The few male characters act as catalysts in the plot, starting in flashback to Miriam’s late mother’s seduction, and continuing as time passes and some of the young villagers begin to agitate against the tsar’s regime. The novel exposes the brutality of the regime as well as that of the radical socialists, who in 1905 struggle through one abortive "revolution" after another. Tsarist police throw teenagers in jail for distributing leaflets; radical organizers exploit and steal from each other. Young women activists touchingly confide their longings for a beautiful coat or dress only to a trustworthy friend so as not to be thought decadent by their comrades.

Miriam is first doomed and later helped by her stepmother’s idealistic sister Bayla, who rejects a traditional arranged marriage within the village and vanishes to Kiev with her socialist lover. Eventually the distant Bayla grudgingly admits she longs for true love, to be cherished for herself instead of earning her worth by struggling for revolution. Her more stridently political lover admits to feeling a fatal reluctance at a crucial moment. Mixed feelings are everywhere. Miriam’s views of the swamp, the forest, her parents and friends, and the few affluent villagers change throughout her young life. She’s a completely believable character, with the warmth and the fears and flaws of a real person. The reader’s sympathy for Miriam grows as she begins to long to make independent choices, though she is not well equipped for them thanks to her sheltered upbringing. Her healthy adolescent drive for a life and an identity independent of her family’s is what pushes her into the circle of doomed revolutionaries. The reader can almost see what is coming and it’s poignant to know this noble young woman is going to lose her freedom. (This is not a plot-spoiler; the book is told in flashback.)

Miriam spends most of her time in flashback, but she gives us glimpses of her life in prison. She lives with several other women "politicals" in a frigid shack whose interior is coated with ice all winter. In summer, they grow a stingy garden in a courtyard outside. The women pay visits to a nearby house of criminal women, who live in even more squalid, crowded conditions, to help them stay as clean and healthy as possible. Madness is always on the edge of each woman’s consciousness, and it intrudes so frequently that they have devised specific methods of trying to help each other hold onto sanity.

Miriam’s driving hope, the source of her will to survive, is her letter to her daughter, whom she knows she may never see. Her hope and her persistent work on the memoir is fueled by letters from her daughter’s foster-mother and from her own stepmother, who now lives as far as it’s possible to get from the village where the story began. At the end, I closed the book feeling equal amounts hope and doubt, just as I would in a real life-and-death situation. The author could have afforded to let the plot of Your Mouth Is Lovely ramble a bit more, but I loved it anyway. If you prefer books that are tightly written and unified in viewpoint, this is an especially good read. ----google.com----