Evan Fallenberg's ambitious second novel When We Danced on Water [[Kindle]] explores two marvelous characters in Tel Aviv who make art from painful pasts. Vivi, a 42 year-old waitress:
"I paint. I embroider. I makes collages," she says, bending back a finger as she lists each addition. "I whittle, I sculpt. I photograph. I sketch, I bead, I weave. I do video art. And right now I'm learning glassblowing. That's not the whole list, but you get the picture."
Her customer is an 84 year-old man, Teo Levin, who has devoted his life to a single discipline, dance, as a former prodigy and renowned choreographer. You'll notice he is exactly twice her age, and their parallels are many. Both Jewish, single, and childless, their most significant romances were with German Christian men under very different circumstances yielding the same result: imprisonment. Teo's famous ballet is Obsession, inspired by the six years he spent in Berlin during the war as a teenage kept-boy of a handsome, married Nazi officer, Freddy. Teodor wasn't gay; he had previously been in budding love with a girl in Copenhagen but over time he became more ambiguous about Freddy's nightly sexual advances. Freddy renames him Teo and, tellingly, he remains Teo for life. The themes of imprisonment, renaming, and the war making people lose their identity are reinforced by a subplot in which Teo's sister Margot is hidden in a convent and elects to stay there forever as Sister Katharina.
The novel's very best sections are the oddball friendship between Vivi, who lives with a hot gay DJ, and Teo, who lives with a devoted housekeeper from his native Warsaw, Nelly. Skillful flashbacks are gripping in the first two-thirds of the book. The final third is an extended, heartfelt 75-page memory of Teo's time with Freddy, which some readers may find long, already knowing the ultimate outcome, but the scenes give greater depth to Teo's psyche and to understanding his Obsession. In the closing pages, after Vivi has heard Teo's story in full, she thinks:
"The themes are the same as the old stories -- cruelty, lust, power, disenfranchisement, dignity, love and hate, obsession -- but without the concentration camps, the dogs, the rampaging, murderous mobs."
As a summary of Fallenberg's book, it comes close, but overlooks his humor which can be wry and touching. Here's Teodor leaving for Denmark at 14, reading a letter from his father:
" 'Be flexible where you can, but do nothing contrary to the principles upon which you have been raised.' There was no listings of those principles and Teodor wondered what they were."
Read When We Danced on Water, and if you missed it earlier, get his award-winning debut Light Fell [[Kindle]]).
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