“In the olden times, in the old country of Latvia, a girl walks out of the city into the forest to gather mushrooms in a basket, like a child in a fairytale.” So begins Linda Grant’s absorbing ninth novel, The Story of the Forest. The year is 1913, the mushroom-gathering girl 14-year-old Mina Mendel, daughter of a prosperous Jewish flour merchant in Riga, who happens while walking to stumble upon a clandestine meeting of Bolshevik boys. They are singing. One of them asks her to dance. Exultant, a little afraid, Mina “felt something dislodge in her, the mechanism that was winding her down like a cheap clock to early marriage and a replica of her mother’s pale floury form”. Change is duly set in motion. When Mina summons the courage to return to the forest, her scheming younger brother, Itzik, follows and witnesses her first, chaste kiss. Gleefully, he reports the news back to their eldest brother, Jossel. Afraid that his father will hear of it and hustle the spirited Mina into a respectably miserable marriage, anxious himself to escape the stifling predictabilities of his father’s business, Jossel suggests that they emigrate to America.
Folk tales, as Grant points out, begin with a journey. This particular journey takes Mina and Jossel as far as England, where first lack of funds and then the outbreak of war prevent the onward crossing to New York. Instead, they settle in Liverpool. Left behind in Riga, their parents and three siblings must endure in their different ways the agonies of “the great wound of the 20th century”, but, safe in the Jewish community of Brownlow Hill, Mina’s closest brush with the Bolshevist idealism of the boys in the forest is working in the cafeteria of a munitions factory during the “Great War”. Meanwhile, Jossel is sent to the eastern front where he, too, acquires a story that will be polished up and passed down the generations: he saves the life of a fellow soldier, a Polish Jew who later becomes Mina’s husband.
Tracing the arc of Mina’s life over the full span of the 20th century, The Story of the Forest defies expectation. It is a sprawling family epic elegantly contained in fewer than 300 pages, a story of Jewish assimilation from the margins of Jewish history. The horrors of persecution and pogroms, of gas and genocide, take place off stage and to other people. As Itzik sourly observes of Mina’s in-laws, they are “immigrants, not exiles or émigrés”; their position in Liverpool is as “members of the aspiring bourgeoisie”. While Mina and Jossel must endure the persistent tinnitus of British antisemitism, its rumblings only occasionally ratchet to a frightening roar. Mostly, they concern themselves with the ordinary preoccupations of ordinary people: they marry, acquire homes and businesses, have children, let those children go. They anglicise their names. Slowly, over generations, they assimilate. It remains a haphazard, uneven process. As fast as anyone can change, the world changes faster. Mina must adapt to a new country, with its unfamiliar customs and language; her daughter Paula, with her stylish clothes and cut-glass accent copied from the BBC, must navigate a postwar London in which attitudes to sex and marriage are being turned upside down.
Over 30 years, in both her novels and her nonfiction, Grant has proved herself a shrewd chronicler of social history. In The Story of the Forest, even the texture of her writing reflects its period: the simple language of the folk tale gives way to the coolly wry prose of a mid-century novelist such as Elizabeth Taylor, and then to a looser, more dialogue-heavy style as social conventions ease, marriages break down, Valium is swallowed and same-sex relationships emerge from the shadows. This is the Liverpool that Grant grew up in – her mother’s parents emigrated there from Kyiv, her father’s from Russian-occupied Poland – and she summons it beautifully, sharp observation tempered with humour and tenderness.
Grant’s omniscient narrator hovers over the story, casually dropping in references to future events, marking an anecdote with an observation a character will not make until decades later. Against this notion that life is a tale with no ending, Grant sets the careful crafting and remaking of the immigrant narrative, the family stories obsessively told and retold, the beginning, middle and end of the freshly minted self. It is a compelling theme and one that works best not in Grant’s sometimes heavy-handed interjections on the theory of storytelling but in the closely observed warp and weft of her characters’ lives: the political necessities that shape their stories, the changing cultural standards that reframe them, the repetitions that wear away their edges and turn them into myths, heirlooms to be handed down from one generation to the next. What is left may be false memories or exaggerations or downright lies. What matters is that the characters themselves spring from these pages, vividly, unforgettably alive.
• The Story of the Forest by Linda Grant is published by Little, Brown (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
