October 13, 2009 Literary Arts

A Freudian slip from Poland to Montreal

Freud finds symbolism in the classic immigrant’s tale

by Pascale Rose Licinio

GRAPHIC AMERICA BLASCO

In the house where Distantly Related to Freud’s heroine Ellen lives with her mother, there is a portrait hanging over the mantelpiece.

However, it’s not the portrait of a relative they lost in the tragedy they rarely talk about that forced them to flee Poland a few years before. It’s not even the picture of Ellen’s father, who was “in the wrong place at the wrong time” and is now nowhere to be found.
It’s the portrait of a distant relative: Sigmund Freud.

To Ellen’s mother, who belonged to the Central European intelligentsia that settled in Montreal after the Second World War, that familial connection to the father of psychoanalysis is a great source of pride.

“By evoking Freud, you evoke the world that created Freud—these countries that were under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—that valued education and the arts and saw themselves as capitals of enlightenment,” said author Ann Charney.

Like her heroine, Charney was born in Poland and immigrated to Montreal as a child. Distantly Related describes the complexity of the immigrant experience, particularly that of those who survive disasters or wars.

“A lot of people who survive disasters don’t really talk about that,” she said. “They come to North America to reinvent themselves. In order to do that, they often try to shed their past. Of course, they never succeed totally.”

Ellen, the narrator, grows into

a thoughtful but impatient teenager. Her connection to Freud brings no longing for a faraway world she cannot even remember. It instead symbolizes her growing self-awareness and her hunger for understanding the world as much as she can in order to discover who she is.

Distantly Related centres on Ellen’s appetite for experience and hypersensitivity; it successfully describes the blooming of a young girl longing for freedom and sensuality and how independence often comes at a price.

Some parts of the story may feel a bit too detailed, but the narrative offers good insight into Montreal in the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s.

“I was writing about a city that no longer exists,” explained Charney. “I wanted people who weren’t there to know what it had been like and others to be able to recognize the parts I had put in the book, our shared common memory.”

She relied on her memories of the city during that period to write the story and made sure she had got the facts right afterwards.

“It was the opposite of writing non-fiction, where the story comes after interviews and a lot of research,” said Charney, who is also a renowned journalist. “Because, to me, fiction is something that first comes from inside of you.”

Distantly Related to Freud
Ann Charney
Cormorant Books
336 pp
$21.00