Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,104

finish Far to Go, and I’m glad that I took it.

TO: What do you think of the cover?

AP: I love the cover. It’s by Alysia Shewchuk—her first effort!—she really nailed the ethos of the book.

TO: Are you working on anything new?

AP: While writing Far to Go I was also taking notes for my next book, which is something I haven’t done before, but the material was presenting itself and I didn’t want to lose it. It’s a memoir about a depression I experienced while I was exploring my family’s lost Judaism. So, yes, I’ve technically started, and have hundreds of pages of rough notes. The key word being “rough.” This fall I’ll be busy teaching at the Banff Centre, promoting Far to Go, and hanging out with my baby, so it’ll probably be 2011 by the time I’m able to actually sit down and start shaping the notes into an actual book. I’m looking forward to it, though, I must admit. There’s nothing like the feeling of seeing a new project take shape, form itself from scribbles and half-thoughts into something with narrative arc and coherence.

In Search of the Past

Originally published in Quill & Quire magazine, September 2010. Reprinted with permission.

Alison Pick explores her family’s hidden traditions in a novel about war and Jewish identity.

By Micah Toub

ALISON PICK pulls some papers out of her bag and passes them to me across the table. They’re worn and stained, though she tells me the document is only a few years old. “This is something my dad did,” she says as I look over the printout of an Excel spreadsheet. We’re chatting on the patio of her regular coffee spot, a block away from her home in Toronto’s Annex. About ten pages in total, the papers record the story of her grandparents’ escape from Czechoslovakia during the Second World War through an analysis of the various stamps and notes made in the couple’s joint passport.

The first entry reveals that her grandfather was in Egypt on a business trip when the Nazis marched into the Czech Sudetenland along the country’s border regions on October 1, 1938. He never returned to his homeland. The spreadsheet then shows how, over the next three years, he and his wife travelled, separately and together, through Europe and the Middle East—Italy, Greece, Palestine, and elsewhere—attempting to secure safe passage from Europe.

They eventually did get out, making their way from London to Trinidad and then up to Canada. But when they finally settled in Sherbrooke, Quebec, in 1941, they had left something behind—their religion.

“They decided to raise my dad and uncle and not tell them they were Jewish,” Pick says, explaining that her paternal grandparents, traumatized by the war and by the loss of her grandmother’s parents in Nazi camps, pretended to be Christian as they melded into their new society. And although Pick’s father did eventually come across enough clues to figure out his true heritage, he and his wife—a Christian—decided to raise Pick and her sister in a secular home.

Now, almost seventy years after the Picks’ arrival in Canada, their granddaughter is publishing a novel that is not only likely to be the thirty-four-year-old’s breakout book, but that also coincides with a personal breakthrough—the reclaiming of her cultural heritage for herself and her family.

Far to Go (House of Anansi Press), Pick’s follow-up to her 2005 debut novel The Sweet Edge, centres on the lives of a Jewish Czech family during and after the Munich Agreement of 1938, when the Allies of Europe allowed Germany to annex Czechoslovakia. Although Pick did not model the characters directly on her ancestors, researching the book allowed her to explore her Jewish roots, a topic that has been on her mind for the last decade.

“My grandmother died in 2000,” she says, “and I think my dad felt that after she was gone there wasn’t the same need to protect her.” The open conversations Pick had with her father about their Judaism inspired some of the material in her first book of poetry, Question & Answer, published in 2002.

More recently, Pick’s questions encouraged her father to continue with his own research, which in turn fed Far to Go. He tracked down half a dozen unpublished memoirs by survivors who lived in Czechoslovakia during the time of the Munich Agreement, which Pick says helped her paint the day-to-day lives of the fictional Bauers, a family torn apart emotionally and physically by the war. Her father also introduced her to the retired manager of a textile