putting the knit in shizknitz

Last year, I was given Interpreter of Maladies on my birthday which I have treasured but still lays unread on my dresser. Recently during the holidays, I picked up a novel written by the same author, Jhumpa Lahiri titled The Namesake. I started reading it a few weeknights ago, and was instantly hooked, blessed by this horrible unusual rainy weather in Los Angeles, was able to finish it, just a few minutes ago.

The book is a fictional story of a Bengali immigrant family, a story told from many viewpoints over 2 generations. Although the only commonality I share with the main character, Gogol is of being asian descent (as in, the continent of Asia) the story was personal, one I could have told in surprising similarity, probably paralleling many other immigrants across many cultures. The book begins from the mother’s perspective, of being married and leaving her country and her familty - everything she has ever known, to move to America with her husband in an area of few other Bengalis. The description of her loneliness and despair as she stayed at home alone while her husband was at work and the struggles with her new culture is how I have always imagined, never truly known, to what my own mother probably felt and experienced during our first few years in Minnesota. As a young child you are oblivious, I don’t recall ever thinking I was different until a self-conscious age in 6th grade, although by that time we were already living here in a largely minority state of California. I can relate to Gogol’s feelings of his family in his “home” country - almost like faint whispers of your memory, mostly handwriting in letters and voices on the phone as your physically close family friends and neighbors feel more like family than blood relatives. Of course, the title refers to Gogol’s lifelong challenge and inner turbulance relating to his name aesthetically and philosophically. For those who know me, understand.

The brilliance of the novel really sets in at the end, as the family, both generations begin to realize what can be summed up by an old Japanese saying “sume ba miyako” (loosely translated: “once you live there, it becomes home”) and just the same, although every trip back to Japan brings a thoughtful longing of “whatifs”, I know deep down that my own family - parents, sibling and myself call America home.