No matter how our lives turn out, whether we become presidents or poppers, innovators or winos, our happiness is determined by our origins. We may be lavished with honors, plaudits and triumphs. We may explore the ends of the earth and hold industries in our hands. Nonetheless, securing the approval of those who birthed us, those who shaped us, consumes us. For without them, we would not exist. Without them to shelter us through our development, we would not be who we are. For all that they might anger and frustrate us, we owe them. We want to repay that debt by making them proud.
But what if we can't? What if, because of small minds and small hearts, we can't win their approval? Worse yet, what if, through no fault of our own, we never had the chance because they surrendered us to other parents, other futures? How then do we satisfy our need to be loved? Ms. Ullman ruminates in this wonderfully strange novel.
The year is 1974 and foggy San Francisco is still hungover from the energetic highs of the 1960s. Disco fills its nightclubs and the Zodiac Killer occupies its tabloids while its districts expand and contract, shift and evolve, to meet the wide-ranging tastes of the cities multicultural and multigenerational clientele. Into this sleepy sea of self-discovery tumbles another in a long line of seekers, a university professor who, thanks to an indiscretion with a male student, has been banished from the familiar world of academia. Forced to adjust himself to this world of the real with which he's only passingly familiar, the professor engages a room on the eighth floor of an office tower where he begins to optimistically sketch out lesson plans for future semesters even while the investigation into his misconduct continues.
All of the professor's plans, however, are aborted when, one day, he realizes that he shares a shockingly thin wall with a psychiatrist's practice. Over the subsequent weeks and months, the professor falls into the habit of eavesdropping on the psychiatrist's sessions with Patient 3, a lesbian in her 30s who, in spite of a successful career, is less than happy with the life she's carved out for herself. The source of her discontent stems from her adoptive parents who keep secrets from her even while struggling to accept her gayness. If she could only find her birth mother, perhaps she might find some acceptance... The utterly engrossed professor has a new mission, a new obsession. Secretly, stealthily, he will bend his powers upon the problem of uncovering the woman's origins. For it is infinitely more interesting than contemplating his dim and meager future.
Refreshingly bizarre, By Blood combines an inventive premise with a gripping tale of secretive origins to create an engrossing read full of war, its degradations and its shames. Told primarily through the overheard dialogue between the psychiatrist and her patient, the narrative taps into the turbulent political and economic times of the 1970s before expanding to touch upon the careless freedom of western Europe in the 1920s and 30s, the horrific deprivations of the Nazis in the 1940s, and finally the creation and the maintenance of the Jewish state in the 1950s. All are sourced in order to enrich a tangled tapestry of twisting lies and fateful choices. Ms. Ullman's characters, though few, are as fully realized as her lush reconstructions of wartime Germany and post-1967 Israel, both of which are delightfully and chillingly animated so that we might step into the past and regard the full extent to which war, and the ideologies that feed it, contort the human soul and compel it to make decisions it should never have to make.
The richness of the story, however, is secondary to the author's contemplations of the nature of identity and the extent to which it is shaped by ones origins. Her story's primary protagonists, the professor and the patient, are never named. More over, they both have allowed their uncertain parentage to distort their personalities, reducing them to successful but hopeless obsessives who require answers in order to be complete, to be at rest. What they miss, of course, is that they are seeking love, not answers, affection not explanations. They desire what they did not get when they needed it most, a foundation of unreserved support and acceptance that empowers children to flower into adults.
This is a fascinating and compelling novel which strongly resists being put down until its final page has been turned. Such origin stories tend towards navel-gazing, but Ms. Ullman's tale possesses more than enough sinfulness to keep things spicy. (5/5 Stars)
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