Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Finding Theodore and Brina
By Terri-Ann White
Fremantle Arts Centre Press
Nov 2001, Paperback, 232 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1863683371
Memoir writing is inherently paradoxical. On the one hand the author is creating a story, so the reader needs enough of a narrative thread to follow a line of progression. On the other hand, memory is unreliable, a reconstructive process built out of fragments and artefacts, recreated into something distinctive every moment. And yet these recreations are at the heart of identity. Terri-Ann White leans into this paradox in Finding Theodore and Brina, allowing herself full creative license in the almost impossible attempt to uncover stories that have been buried, obfuscated, or are just missing, to create an engagement rather than a re-telling. The result is a multi-layered, complex memoir that plays with the notion of what we can and cannot know while creating something as true as any memoir.
The book is written in eight sections, some exploring process or place and some that focus in on different family members. Each section is self-contained, following a pathway to some kind of conclusion that is distinct enough to stand alone, but the sections also link, creating a cumulative effect. The prologue, “in other places”, sets the scene perfectly, preparing the reader for what follows and situating the book in a poetic, sensual landscape. This is the story of Perth, but also the human body, multiple love and grief stories, as well as an autobiography/discovery of a self in multiple points of time and through multiple perspectives. There are constants through the shifting perspectives. The narrative voice is one – let’s say that’s the author, who engages with the material as a character, allowing us to see the impact of the past, and the imprint of these family members and their tragedies. The other is the city of Perth – it’s natural beauty and the sense of belonging it provides:
Driving around this river, on the rump of land, on the winding road between escarpment and water. The light leaving the sky slowly, the water glistening. The sky leached of all late-day colour is the palest shade of … what? How could it be described? As if in a dream, it’s so soft you could wrap yourself in it because you have never seen anything so extraordinary. A shade of salmon, but not pink. (15)
The history of Perth is one of the threads of the book, starting with the arrival of Captain James Stirling and Botanist Charles Fraser, at the Swan River in 1827, observing the same beauty that the narrator sees in the present day. There are many such arrivals, the Swan River functioning as an broader origin point throughout the book. One of the more pertinant arrivals is that of Theodore Krakouer in 1851 at that same river, as a convict, transported to Perth after two years in gaol for stealing clothes and money. Theodore arrived alone, leaving his wife and son behind in England. Brina Isreal arrived in 1853, a free migrant looking for domestic work. She and Theodore were married and had nine children. This is the Theodore and Brina of the title, and the story of these two great-grandparents of the narrator, forms a backbone to what is also a very personal memoir:
And now, I yearn to be part of a longer story of blood and connection Perhaps this is what happens when you don’t have children of your own to keep the line flowing; perhaps it is an act of compensation, this recording. (32)
The timeframes of the book are often blurred: moving between 1851 1853, 1874, 1893, 1993, and present day. The book jumps around in time, person, narrative voice, and space, and it’s clear from the start that this will not be a progressive chronology but will instead follow the windings of memory and the happenstance nature of research. We continue to return to the Krakouers, their lives and their secrets: Theodore’s Judaism, his growing alcoholism, his insanity, syphilis, and miscegenation, that is sexual relations between different races. The progeny was hidden and denied. There is also Brina’s stint in the poorhouse and the shame she felt around Theodore’s failings, but there are other characters that are woven into the story. One of those is Julie, a cousin who died in a secret childbirth, from a deadly toxaemia that led to brain haemorrhage. Julie’s secret pregnancy mirrors her grandmother Ena Krakouer Le Comte’s own secret pregnancy, while Theodore’s illnesses mirror those of his son David’s. These family secrets and the submerging of the grief that surrounds them, including the original persecution which led to Theodore and Brina’s migration from Poland, lead to a broader kind of toxaemia. White writes about this with poetic precision, linking the events in a way that feels natural and universal:
The pure silence around that baby. Folding into itself. Providing an example for women further down the line. Julie. Keep it quiet. She had the baby and then took her home. (82)
Other characters include the feisty, “fancy” Nancy Krakouer, In spite of her own Jewish heritage, Nancy is interned for her involvement with Australia First, a pro-Japan, highly racist/antisemitic organisation. There is Aunty May, Theodore’s grandaughter, who is in a nursing home with Alzheimers. May’s broken memory, charged by the artefacts which surround her in the home, becomes a synecdoche for the way memory works:
The way she remembers. The stops and starts in the narrative of her life. She stops herself. It is a compelling rhythm, all that repetition. Like the music of minimalist composers. Stop. Start. Go for a burst. Stop. May makes a mesmeric beat just with her pauses. (114)
The stories moves across identities, engaging with notions of ancestry, memory, history and how this is a very Australian story of family, both essential and impossible. Each new story becomes part of the whole. We are privy to the problems of research and the way in which luck and tenacity drive what gets into the story: a microfiche cache of letters, a family tree, an official record, and how imagination has to fill the gaps in a way that is as real as any evidenced-based information:
There is so little passed down that I have become a collector of shards: of memory, what might have been told to me at the end of this long line of tales. I want to catch these half-lit, often, paste jewels. I don’t know how authentic they are but does it even matter? For me it doesn’t matter because I want to see what can be made anew, built from the remains. To honour the fleeting, the fragment, fractured histories and stories. (198)
Finding Theodore and Brina is an extraordinary memoir, delivered in pieces and made whole through a combination of imagination and artefacts. The result is a rich collage that explores history, sociology, psychology, geography and philosophy across a spectrum of short stories with differing perspectives that combine into cohesive and powerful narrative.