For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors

Laura Esther Wolfson writes in this essay collection, the Iowa Prize for Nonfiction award winner, dreamy, reflectional, sometimes confessional pieces of memoir heavily focused on several themes. An interpreter and translator by profession, the idea of translation and the role of language in life, love, identity, relationships, work, and everyday interpersonal interactions is the topic that felt like a constant. Russian and French are her acquired languages, and she came to them in interesting ways, particularly Russian. It's more unusual for an American, born in the country to parents who were also born there, to become fluent in Russian. Wolfson lived and traveled for work in various former Soviet republics, including Georgia, meeting her first husband in Tbilisi.

This ex-husband figures strongly in her storytelling, in part because she acknowledges that her Russian skills are strong thanks to "the husband method," that is, she learned a lot from living with and loving him. The marriage was crumbling as she worked on translating a book of Russian slang and gulag terms, and that time in her life is a powerfully depicted moment as she realizes a change is inevitably coming.

There's another uncomfortable but all-too-common life theme running through these stories, and that's of chances not taken, opportunities lost, and the regrets that time can make clear from these. Wolfson faces down the reality of life after political change creates a boom in translation demand, and when in her youth she felt professionally fulfilled taking interpreting jobs, even for high-profile people and events. She suddenly finds herself afflicted with a degenerative lung condition and poor or no health insurance as a freelancer. Her marriage to the Russian native speaker has ended, and she considers pieces of it, including how he helped her advance her Russian language skills so far, as she continues working on translation projects.

Wolfson navigates a couple of subjects multiple times, making this feel somewhat less like a cohesive collection and more like one compiled from essays written for herself, on topics and events that she needed to get out of her system (which she more or less confesses to, in one of them.) It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's sometimes repetitive.

"Losing the Nobel" might have been my favorite essay of the bunch, in which she interprets for an author who was then little known in the west, Svetlana Alexievich, and around this time Wolfson makes a decision that will affect her for a long time to come. Maybe because I was also reading The Unwomanly Face of War at the same time as this one, but I found it a very well done piece that gives the reader a lot to ponder and consider when it's finished. And she does a very worthy sort of mini-profile of Alexievich, while also taking issue with some incorrect, misunderstood translation in her book, Voices from Chernobyl. 

There are so many graceful, well crafted lines in these pieces. In terms of themes, I loved most when she wrote about her experiences and travels in the Soviet Union, or how it feels to visit a place you've been to before, like Montmartre in her case, and recall the other times you were there - other times in your life with other people. She ruminates on these things in a way that feels so much like getting a glimpse of someone's very intimate interior monologue, and it's very striking and powerful.

It's now over a year and a half since I last spoke to that friend; we had a falling-out. But when I walk down that narrow street lined with bolts of cloth for sale, I feel as if we've just talked, much as you may think momentarily on waking that someone long gone from your life has just paid you a brief visit, an impression that is merely a vestige of the night's dreaming.

I also loved the way language is a thread sewing everything together in her stories - maybe because I also work in languages, although it wasn't such a passion or talent for me as it was for her in her beginnings of study and career. But I've come to some of the same realizations as she has, about language and identity and culture being so inextricably all bound up, and the ability of language to stoke memory and feelings of place, or the strange confines certain languages force us to abide by.

In other places, I got a little tired of the same topics, of knowing where a thread was going as soon as it began. Still, there's a lot of great writing here, a lot of history, and a fascinating look at so many areas of life and the world through the eyes of someone so deeply steeped in language.

Another frequent theme is Jewishness and what it means to identity and family history. As it's her specialty, Wolfson's stories about Judaism and those she encounters in connection to it are viewed through the lens of language, like an older writer desperate to have his work translated into English at last, or her attempts at learning Yiddish, and that language's connection to its Eastern European roots.

Speaking to someone in Vilnius, Lithuania, where she's taking an intensive Yiddish course, she describes this exchange:

"Sonya got married and moved to Spain," she said, adding a grammatical fillip that made the phrase "got married" function like a Russian verb of motion (a category usually limited to forms of "walk," "ride," and "fly"), transporting Sonya to the land of castles and castanets on a magic carpet woven out of language.

I loved learning things like this. Some strong writing and a lot to think about in these essays about growing older and wiser, illness, love, language, change and memory.

With a title that reminds the healthy Russian magical realism, this collection of essays written in an equally healthy self-irony touching upon less healthy episodes, personal and intellectual adventures in the Russian language is a journey that ends up too early. I personally would have want more word-crafted explorations, because once you are opening the box of intellectual encounter you don't want/can't stop it so fast.

Besides the personal search of meaning, the essays do have fine observations about language(s), the social and political pressures of the professional translators or dealing with hard to write or pronounce maladies. Not all of the essays are equal, but all do have episodes which contains polished worlds made of words.

In fact, for a long time I did not enjoy so much simple explorations of intellectual mussings, as the ones about reading Proust while commuting. Trivialization of a monument of the French/world literature, my mother would have judge instantly. I rather say that once you are part of the mind/intellectual games, you can see so much beauty in the act of reading Proust while commuting.

More than once, it was hard for me to accept that Laura Esther Wolfson decided completely free to learn and specialized as a translator into the Russian language, without prior strings - family, especially - attached. Therefore, her adventures in the world of language do offer a completely different perspective than in the case of someone with a certain previous connection. 'Cognition is a zero sum game (...): the additional effort required to comprehend and formulate in a foreign language is substracted from the capactiy to recall when it's over, you run a search on your recollections only to realize that the conversation has left shockingly few traces. When you leave your native language, your breathe a different substance, and like a mermaid who comes ashore, you cannot comfortably stay for long. Your native depths keep calling you home'.

Language is for her the way to take control over the reality and her identity. When she is trying to create her own Jewish story, it is through language that the deep encounter takes place, as she goes to Lithuania to learn Yiddish.

Awarded the Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction, For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors - you have to read the book to understand the meaning of this mysterious title - promises hopefully more books by Laura Esther Wolfson. Personally, I would love to read more from her soon.