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On The Bookshelf

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`The Paris Tears Of Rosie Hamlin'

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(248) 540-8780

Ribalow Prize winner Rechard Teleky's heroine, an outsider
like her creator, finds her past far from home.

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T

SANDEE BRAWARSKY
Special to the Jewish News

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here's a tenderness about
Rosie Kamin that makes her
hard not to love.
The heroine of Richard
Teleky's first novel, The Paris Years of
Rosie Kamin (Steerforth Press) — the
winner of the 1999 Harold U.
Ribalow Prize from Hadassah Magazine
is a 40-year old American woman
who has spent the last 20 years living
in Paris.
The daughter of a
Holocaust survivor, she's
smart, sensitive, vulnera-
ble, anxious and loving;
she's first seen in the novel
climbing the steps of the
Metro with a broken heel
strap on her sandal, strug-
gling to keep her foot in
the shoe.
Largely disconnected
from her American and
Jewish roots, Rosie would
have been surprised to find
herself celebrated by an
auditorium full of
Hadassah activists, as she
was at last month's award
ceremonies at Hadassah
House in Manhattan.
Richard Teleky, Rosie's
creator, was quite surprised
himself "I'm overwhelmed
and very honored," he told
the Hadassah audience. A
53-year-old professor of
creative writing and litera-
ture at York University in
Toronto where he is a
member of the Center for
Jewish Studies, Teleky is
one of few non-Jewish winners in the
17-year history of the Ribalow Prize. It
is awarded annually to an author
"deserving of recognition" for a work
of fiction on a Jewish theme.
The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin. is the
kind of novel that stays with the read-
er, long after its closing pages. It's a
grown-up coming-of-age story, a tale
of reawakening.

1

I

Sandee Brawarsky is a New York-based
book critic.

Rosie's mother, a survivor of
Auschwitz who lived in Pittsburgh and
often said, "My past's past," killed her-
self with an overdose of pills. Rosie
hides from her own history and from
some truths of her own life.
A teacher of English as a second
language, Rosie suffers, as a French
doctor tells her, from "le stress." After
more loss and suffering, she begins a
process of healing, discovering a new
resiliency as she, finally, learns to
stretch her present to finds a place for
the past.
As Anne Roiphe, the 1988 Ribalow

realistic fable. You believe every word
as you're reading."
In an interview, the author talks
about Rosie as a character he "discov-
ered" while writing. Fifty pages into
the novel, as he "began to know who
she was" — a Jewish woman, daugh-
ter of a survivor — he realized that he
was doing a risky thing, and ques-
tioned whether he had the right to
continue.
"I have mixed feelings about the
appropriation of voice. I feel it's
immoral to pass myself as something
I'm not," he says, asserting that he

"I've had courses

where 20 of my

students have

said, 'Oh, there's

no such thing as

the Holocaust.'

It disturbs me

terribly.

"

-- Richard Teleky

recipient who delivered the keynote
address at the awards ceremony said,
"This is not Hemingway's Paris."
Rosie's Paris is a city of exiles and
outsiders, of North African cafes,
Vietnamese and Turkish neighbors, of
decaying buildings. Her boyfriend is a
French Leftist who shares her love for
walking around the city. She's visited
by her sister Deb, a New Yorker who
lacks a sense of the subtle.
Roiphe described the novel as "a

never pretended to be a child of sur-
vivors, a Jew or a woman. "It's impor-
tant for writers to try to envision a
world beyond their own biographies."
Teleky explains that he was very
careful in writing about Rosie's world,
and points out that he has "lived
much of my life in what I would call
a Jewish milieu."
The grandson of Hungarian immi-
grants, he grew up in Cleveland and
from childhood on had Jewish friends

