On Monday evening (13 October) we held a very successful launch for Give Us This Day by Helena Wiśniewska Brow at Unity Books.
Herewith, Harry Ricketts launch speech for the book:
In 2009 I was lucky enough to
have Helena in my second-year creative nonfiction class at the IIML. It’ll be no surprise to any of you here to
learn that for her portfolio she produced some terrific pieces. One of these was called “Stefan”, and told
the story of how Helena with her father tried to relocate the house in East Poland
(now Belarus) that he had been forced to leave as a twelve-year-old in 1941. This
was the start, Helena explained to us, of an epic journey that brought him and some
of his siblings to New Zealand in 1944, among other Polish children offered
sanctuary in Pahiatuha. I’m relieved to find that my report on Helena’s
portfolio was very positive. Here’s a snippet:
The character
of your father comes across very powerfully, particularly the contrast between
his usual, awkward New Zealand self and his extrovert Polish self which emerges
only fleetingly with his siblings but comes back in fuller form during the
trip. I like the way you organise the piece, folding your father’s history into
the narrative of the journey. The minor characters are vividly etched in. The
writing is crisp throughout.
After my course Helena went on
to do the MA in creative writing at the IIML, and eventually produced Give Us This Day. Reading the
beautifully produced final version, various things strike me. For instance, the
structure, the way the narrative (built around various journeys) is always
moving forward but is also constantly backtracking, folding in on itself,
following now Stefan, now his sister Hela, now Helena’s mother Olga, now a
particular uncle. So, in addition to Stefan, we encounter a raft of fascinating
characters, not least Helena’s mother, whose story has its own poignancy. Indeed
in their very different ways the stories of both of Helena’s parents will, I
think, strike a deep chord with many readers. Because, while unlikely to be
anything like as horrendous as Stefan’s story, the story in one form or another
of a forced or involuntary emigration or exile, and of struggling and only
partially adapting to the New Place, this is a story common to many Pakeha New
Zealand families. This story, you could say, is part of our cultural DNA.
The writing is just as crisp
(and, I should have said, elegant) as I remember. Here is Helena on her father and
her late aunt Hela: “What might be
learned from walking through history again with them as my guides ‒ my elderly
father on one arm, my ghostly aunt on the other?” Here she is on Belarus: “The
country’s KGB atmosphere, the [guide]book said, was its chief tourist
attraction.” Here she is on herself and her sister Zofia: “We are still fussing
about on the fringes of our parents’ lives, worrying about our own.” Not
unexpectedly, there are recurring moments of meditation on memory, exile, home
‒ moments which press against the interwoven stories, particularly of course
Stefan’s, because for him “the longed-for homecoming would [and could] never
take place”.
There is also, and much to
Helena’s credit, an awareness of the difficulties involved in trying to understand
and write someone else’s story. Her subtitle is A Memoir of Family and Exile. I don’t know if, like me, you’ve
noticed over the last few years a prejudice against the term ‘memoir’, as
though a memoir is somehow not quite highbrow enough, just a bit too popular,
too infra dig. A friend of mine (here
in the audience) likes to say in their dogmatical way: “A novel’s a novel.
That’s what it is. It’s just that some novels are better than others.” The same
goes for memoirs. And one of the many reasons why this is such a good memoir is
because, while reading an often startling and heart-turning story (I cried
around page 240, incidentally), we regularly, quietly, bump up against
realisations like this one. Here Helena has been in the university library,
looking at documents relating to the Polish children who came here in 1944:
The library
is emptying and the dark behind its soaring windows bounces my own fuzzy
reflection back at me. I gather up my things to leave. I ask the questions, I
visit the graves and read the books. But I can’t live the story; it’s not mine.
The things [my father] gives me, these pieces of memory, are like Marysia’s
mother’s parcels: carefully wrapped gifts, generously handed over, intriguing
when wrapped in their tissue and string. Unwrapped and exposed, held up to the
light and examined, they are the bits and pieces of a life. What made me think
they could be more?”
And yet there is more, much
more, as you will know if you’ve already read Give Us This Day or will, I hope, very soon discover. In the
meantime, congratulations, Helena, I knew you could do it. Thank you.
