Slashes and Other Signs of Discordance: Review of Nora Gold’s In Sickness and In Health and Yom Kippur in a Gym

In 2024, Guernica Editions published two novellas by Nora Gold in one volume. Rather ingeniously, the novellas, In Sickness and In Health and Yom Kippur in a Gym, begin at opposite ends of the volume. This is to say that one has to flip the book upside down, and begin at the other end (or more precisely, its other starting point) to read the second novella. Interestingly, dividing the book into two stand-alone texts, both concluding roughly in the book’s middle, creates a literal break. It also operates figuratively like a slash, a line between two signifiers often used to establish binaries or juxtapose two objects, ideas, or ways of experiencing the world, each antithetical to the other (sickness/health is only one instance of several antipodes). In this way, the book’s presentation, its very form, is suggestive of the tensions and conflicts at the centre of Gold’s novellas.

Both novellas, albeit in different ways, explore contrarieties that occupy the lives, relationships, and convictions of the main characters, hobbling them emotionally and physically. Together, they form a suite of voices that alternate between expressions of sorrow and hope, disdain and love. In both, Gold has wrought highly affecting, transformative events, which force characters to come to terms with the seemingly discordant in themselves and their circumstances.

In Sickness and In Health

Both novellas contain close studies of suffering and anger, born of disappointment or a sense of betrayal, or, as In Sickness and In Health, stemming from a recurring illness and associated anxiety. Evident throughout is the author’s empathy for ordinary people and their more or less common struggles, as well as fabulous touches of humour. Gold embraces the bawdy; the human condition, she implies, doesn’t have room for angels, and laughter, and whatever gives rise to it (including the crude stuff), are essential antidotes to our collective helplessness in the face of misfortune. Thus, when Lily, the 40-something protagonist of In Sickness and In Health, is confined to her bed due to a recurring illness, she indulges a quirky avocation:

You are practicing your foreign language skills. Curses and insults from around the world are your hobby. Not all kinds interest you: not the “fuck your whore-mother” theme, on which there are many variations….The curses you appreciate are colourful, culture-specific, and show originality or flair. You have no idea how to properly pronounce them, you are probably mangling all these languages terribly, but so what?
“Na mou klaseis ta’rxidia!” (Fart on my balls!) (Greek)
You continue, your mood lightening with each curse:
“Go ndéana an diabhal dréimire de cnámh do dhroma ag piocadh úll i ngairdín Ifrinn!” (May the devil make a ladder of your back bones while picking apples in the garden on hell!) (Gaelic)
Jebiesz jeze!” (You fuck hedgehogs!) (Polish)…
You’re laughing. Happily at first, then a little hysterically. You may be burning up with fever and so frail you can’t sit up in bed, but still you are powerful. (7)

Gold’s use of the intimate second person in the novella provides this glimpse of the protagonist’s lively inner life and contributes to a piercing portrayal of her experience with an undiagnosed illness. This viewpoint—up-close and deeply personal—helps familiarize readers with the history and consequences of Lily’s disabling condition.

When Lily is well and going about her regular life, she is a graphic artist who teaches the art of illustrating graphic novels. When she’s sick, with an ailment that strikes every month, she’s weak, bedridden, and consumed by her malady and its impact on her life. After three years of these bouts, she worries that her husband will lose patience, grow disenchanted with her and their marriage. Even more worrisome to Lily are the possible repercussions from failing to meet her commitments at work. In fact, Lily’s overriding concern is that she won’t recover in time to show up for the lecture she’s scheduled to give in the coming week. Having already used up her sick days, Lily fears that the dyspeptic head of her department is likely to turn the next absence into cause for termination. The difference between presence and absence, if Lily doesn’t recover in time to go to work, is therefore vast in her case. This is the main source of apprehension for Lily, who can’t control the duration of her monthly indisposition. This tension is compounded by the gnawing guilt she feels over her failure to disclose the full gravity of her childhood epilepsy to Perry, her husband, before they were married. She suspects that her unexplained illness may be connected to the neurological disorder that nearly ruined her childhood.

While in bed, Lily relives the first 18 years of her life, which were riven by epilepsy—first by petit mal, then grand mal seizures. By age 14, “she’d had three good years, followed by three bad ones, then four good ones, then four more bad ones” (64). It was an on/off type of condition. Similarly, the petit mal phase of the illness, Lily recalls, was characterized by ‘absences’ of short duration, causing her to lose awareness of her surroundings.
During the bad years, the child Lily was heavily medicated, forced to take powerful anti-convulsants—the kind also used for treating schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (she reflects angrily: “They filled you up like filling an empty bottle and once it was fully, they screwed on the cap. You got screwed” [61]). For years, Lily was dull of mind, clumsy, and unable to follow along at school. At a very young age, as Lily recalls with lingering indignation, she was even labeled “unambiguously as mentally retarded,” an assessment her parents didn’t think to challenge.
When Lily wasn’t on medication, she was an animated child, creative, and a bright student. Yet even during these ‘good’ stretches, she couldn’t escape an awareness of what it was like to be on the other side of her illness: “Her lifelong vacillation between on-pills and off-pills, stupid and smart, was like the flicking of a light switch on and off, and ensuing periods of light and darkness” (64). During late adolescence, Lily’s mother would remind her of the ‘realities’ of her condition with jaw-dropping tactlessness:

Her mother glanced at her sharply. “Epileptics don’t drive,” she said…
“Someone has to tell you the truth, even if it hurts. There’s no point sugar-coating things, or coddling you, as your father likes to do. You’re defective…You’ll never lead a normal life….And most epileptics also don’t hold jobs, get married or have children…. You need to….adjust your expectations.” (68)

Lily does, however, go on to have a “normal” life (that is, an “undrugged/normal” vs. a “drugged/abnormal” one). She has a husband, children, and an artistic career. That’s partly why she’s convinced that she herself is to blame for her unexplained illness—indeed, that it may be a form of punishment, a cosmic and justified response to her hubris in having dared to cross the normal/abnormal divide.

Gold has a PhD in social work, and conducted research on chronic illness and disability. In Sickness and In Health is insightful, and hence a valuable contribution to literature that addresses sickness, its physical and psychological impact, especially the persistence of trauma occasioned by illness. At the same time, the novella is a literary achievement, and should be acknowledged as such. Sickness/health is a reigning dichotomy which the author masterfully deploys, especially at the level of language. Here, as elsewhere in the novella, the author delves into “the two realities [Lily]inhabited,…the two Lilys, that existed” (64):

When you’re sick, the illness boils down your life to its bare essentials,…leaving you with nothing but big existential questions that have a stark, binary answers….in my case when sick: Will I, or will I not, be able to resume a normal life? For sick people, nothing matters except the two potential outcomes available to them—one good, one bad. It’s very black and white. (84)

In addition to providing a vivid and compelling encounter with the effects of illness, In Sickness and In Health hones in on obstacles related to physical infirmity, some of which the protagonist overcame in her past, and others (of an unexplained origin) that prevent her from leading a ‘normal’ life in the present. By contrast, Yom Kippur in a Gym centres on five individuals whose distress is due to maladies of the spirit.

Yom Kippur in a Gym

Yom Kippur in a Gym is structured as a series of prayers, all part of Judaism’s annual ritual of asking God, family, and close friends to forgive any and all wrongdoings. Read together by congregants, who are led by a rabbi, the prayers are an exhortation to honest, often uncomfortable soul-searching. In this novella, descriptions of the main characters, their thoughts and the anguish they betray, are organized around the specific readings comprising the final, most sacred part of the Yom Kippur ceremony. By virtue of the religious requirement that all Jews search their conscience during Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), each of Gold’s main characters is prompted by a particular passage or portion of the service to confront the cause of their turmoil and make a genuine effort to surmount it. This ‘atonement’ is tantamount to an act of moral purification, and is also a means to healing because it involves letting go of deep-seated guilt and anger.

Those who perform the mandated introspection, admit their sins, and ask God to absolve them, begin their new year with a clean slate, so to speak. It is incumbent on all Jews to negotiate a path from unforgiveness to forgiveness. No one is exempt from the requirement to do so, as the young rabbinical student who leads the service explains: “Even the High Priest in ancient times did teshuva on Yom Kippur! Even he did teshuva [atonement]! And his went much further than everyone else’s. He’d stand in front of the entire community and publicly confess all his sins….He held nothing back.” (16)

The antithesis between forgiveness and unforgiveness (also forgiving/unforgiving) on Yom Kippur is a profound one in Judaic thought. Moreover, the supplication, the teshuva, is significant on several levels; crucially, it is an act of self-forgiveness and self-acceptance: “Some people think teshuva means [only] repentance, but this is incorrect. Teshuva means Return. Return to your soul, return to your true nature. Return to who you really are” (19). The readings and commentary, directing all the congregants to self-scrutiny, serve as the novella’s framework. More precisely, Yom Kippur is a culture-specific context, one laden with moral and philosophical gravitas. The occasion of the closing service is especially weighty—enough to spur each of the main characters to engage in painful self-reflection, and, by the end of the service, emerge transformed.

Somewhat unconventionally, the Yom Kippur service in Gold’s novella is being held inside a gymnasium for the sake of greater social inclusivity. This accounts for the diversity among those in attendance. This group of congregants includes Tom, a representative of the synagogue that’s sponsoring the service in the gym. Tom is a successful physician, an upstanding member of his community, and a devoted husband and father. Well dressed and put together, he appears aloof, but not like someone tormented by toxic family dynamics. His father’s recent death has left Tom conflicted. He knows that on the one hand, Yom Kippur makes it incumbent on all to forgive a deceased parent; on the other hand, he can’t forget that his father was violent and mean—beating and verbally abusing him when he was a child, then continuing to belittle and ridicule him for decades more. With his father gone, the abuse is perpetuated by Tom’s two sisters, who, Tom is convinced, internalized his father’s nastiness toward him. Tom neither can nor wants to forgive any of them.

Another attendee, Ezra, is a gifted painter, who never managed to develop a career. At 66 years of age, he despairs of ever gaining recognition. He knows his chances of success, now that he can finally devote himself to art, are very slim, especially because unlike younger artists, he has never mastered the art of networking and self-promotion. For Ezra, confronting his own failure “is agonizing. He’s never wanted to be anything but an artist” (37). Still, he doesn’t want to become a discontented man like his uncle Oscar. He promised himself once that “he’d keep all bitterness from his heart and mouth. (As the machzor says, Open your mouth only to declare God’s praise.)” (38).

Also present is Ira, a young student from a small town in Manitoba. Ira is lonely, feels abandoned by his lover Ken (Ira suspects he “started boring Ken, and then annoying him with his cloying dependency and demands”[23]), and is filled with self-loathing. Ira thinks: “[T]here’s no point in living. Because there’s no way to escape loneliness. He’s been lonely his whole life and he doesn’t want to be lonely anymore” (24). Then there’s Lucy, loving wife to 42-year-old Larry, who was just diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Lucy is in denial. She’s struggling to accept the shocking diagnosis.

Yom Kippur in a Gym moves readers between the main characters—from one portrait of despair and agitation to another. Each section in the novella is titled after one person, although some are split between two, as in “Tom/Ira.” Again, Gold has put the slash to use in juxtapositions that suggest both disparities and congruities. Where all the characters clearly intersect, however, is in their ambivalence regarding the teshuva, and its all-encompassing act of forgiveness, which the Yom Kippur service is meant to elicit. Here is one searing description:

[H]e had to say Yizkor, for the first time, for Dad, and all he felt was rage….Why should he recite a loving memorial prayer for a father who was violent and abusive—an uneducated ignoramus who beat him every chance he could, on any pretext, and often without any pretext at all. A father who told him daily that he was a worthless piece of shit and that he wished Tom had never been born. Why should he pray for a peaceful afterlife in heaven…for an asshole who made his son’s life in this wold hell on earth….The only prayer he has for his father is that he should burn in hell. (9)

Readers will no doubt empathize with some of the characters more than others. For me, Tom’s sense of injury, the indignation that consumes him, are among the most potent depictions in Yom Kippur in a Gym.

In literary and artistic terms, Gold’s sequence of third-person interior monologues forms an ensemble of voices that brings to mind a novel by French (born Canadian) Nancy Huston. The Goldberg Variations, published in English in 1996, features a harpsichord recital of Bach by Liliane Kulainn, a beautiful, enigmatic woman, who performs for 30 guests in the private quarters of her home. This intriguing scene is the framing device for 30 interior monologues, each of which articulates and plays on a determined set of themes. In a review I’d written of the novel, I asserted that Bach’s genius is made apparent not by the continuity of the melodic line, but by the inventiveness he demonstrated: his use of the same thematic threads to generate spellbinding variety. Similarly, Huston’s literary achievement can be seen in the finite number of elements she uses to generate variations on the yearnings, insecurities, and resentments plaguing Liliane’s guests. As one monologue follows another in The Goldberg Variations, these elements are cleverly and playfully reintroduced to create new voices—different yet similar, distinct but consonant with one another. The product is a composition which is virtually audible, an instance of Bakhtinian “multivocality” (or “polyphony”), a textual counterpart to a suite of musical variations.

Gold’s novella is a shorter work, but the multivocality in Yom Kippur in a Gym makes Huston’s novel a suitable reference point. Both Gold and Huston focus on human foibles, such as arrogance, indifference to others, self-pity, or pettiness. At the same time, both texts are concerned with the toll life invariably takes on people; characters dwell on illness, the pain that family or lovers inflict, and the inescapable obligations causing some of them to forgo their deepest yearnings or aspirations. Finally, both texts structure their ‘variations’ in response to an event that provokes a grappling with personal tribulations. Yet Huston’s and Gold’s overarching aims aren’t the same, despite the overlap in their narrative strategies.

In The Goldberg Variations, Huston is invested in possibilities—that is, the effects of subtle alterations in tone or emphasis. Liliane’s partner, Bernald, captures the essence of Bach’s variations, and I believe, of Huston’s novel: “There is no progression towards a climax, no revelation of an ultimate meaning—there could be a thousand variations, couldn’t there?” Huston’s cluster of monologues has beauty, even order, but no resolution. By contrast, Gold’s novella reaffirms the importance of arriving at ‘meaning’ or an answer that offers a way forward. Significantly, her characters’ striving for ‘meaning’ is bound up with self-interrogation and moral considerations.

Yom Kippur in a Gym is literature that will be appreciated by readers of varying backgrounds. Most of Gold’s characters are culturally, rather than religiously, Jewish. They’re part of the Canadian mosaic like any other cultural minority. Additionally, they’re a diverse  cast: for instance, Tom is Jewish, but his wife is a convert to Judaism; Ira is gay; Rachel is the synagogue’s baker, an as-yet unmarried woman, etc. Despite this apparent diversity, the novella unfolds in alignment with the religious imperatives of Judaism’s holiest day of the year. Each interior monologue reflects, to one degree or another, Yom Kippur’s call for a private unburdening, along with an earnest entreaty, made directly to God, for “reinscription in the Book of Life.” To be clear, one earns another year of life through a renewed commitment to goals that are worthy of a benevolent and omniscient God, and of the people one loves.

Any critic trying to determine where a work of literature fits beyond the broad category of Canadian fiction may wonder about the specific place of Yom Kippur in a Gym. A student of Jewish literature is also likely to raise some questions. Admittedly, the Yom Kippur service is transfiguring for Gold’s main characters, but what else qualifies this novella as Jewish literature? Although the question is important and deserving of a more in-depth answer, I’ll attempt to address it here only provisionally at best.

Gold’s novella represents contemporary Jewish fiction for several reasons. First and foremost, the author reckons with the full gamut of present-day Jewish experience. Canadian Jews can be practicing or secular, ethnically or outwardly varied, intermarried, non-heterosexual, etc. Crucially, too, what ties self-identifying Jewish Canadians to the larger Jewish community isn’t an open and shut case, since immigration, ethnic mingling and melding, and issues of substance change society over the course of time. Contemporary Jewish fiction can’t pretend that things are otherwise. Gold acknowledges the increasing diversity of Jews, but argues implicitly that forging and maintaining community is constructive and hence important regardless. Lastly, Gold shows that the clarion call of Yom Kippur—to gather, read and sing prayers, and atone individually and collectively on the holiest day of the oldest of the Abrahamic religions—speaks to all Jews. Shared observance continues to unify members of the Jewish faith because of a consensus—long-established and enduring—that individual lives are finite, mere variations on the same themes, while the light of Judaism and its moral tenets are fathomless and eternal.

References

Gold, Nora. In Sickness and In Health/Yom Kippur in a Gym. Guernica Editions, 2024.
($17.95 3, 1 ISBN: 9781771838658)

Huston, Nancy. The Goldberg Variations. Nuage Editions, 1996.