“Do You Love Me?”
by Hila Blum
translated from the Hebrew by Daniella Zamir
from the June 5, 2023 issue of The New Yorker
I don’t know the work of Hila Blum, though I have seen her book How to Love Your Daughter mentioned since it is coming out next month. Daniella Zamir translated that novel, and she is the translator of this story, so maybe this is an excerpt, but either way, I’m interested.
Here is how it starts:
The first time I saw my granddaughters, I was standing across the street, didn’t dare go any closer. The windows in the suburban neighborhoods of Groningen hang large and low—I was embarrassed by how effortlessly I’d got what I’d come for, frightened by how easily they could be gobbled up by my gaze. But I, too, was exposed. The slightest turn of their heads and they would have seen me.
I’m nervous, in a good way, to keep going. Particularly in light of the magazine’s own blurb for the story: “We are the parents of a missing person, but the kind no one around us can understand, not even us.”
What will this be about? I am intrigued to find out. In the meantime, please feel free to comment your thoughts below.
I think this is great, and I have just looked at the first few pages of the uncorrected proof, confirming that this is essentially chapter one of How to Love Your Daughter, so you can read this and then slip right into the book when it comes out.
This story reminds me very very much of the Alice Munro trilogy – Chance, Soon, and Silence, however the character of the mother here is much more opaque, her
Good to know, Trevor, that this is from a book as that may answer my main question here which is why the daughter was motivated to estrange herself from her mother. Presumably, the book will answer this. Nevertheless, this does work as a short story (unlike some excerpts) and I would also agree about Munro–the rather assured, easy non-linearity is much like Munro’s stories.
I agree that the non-linear flow is successful and the story works as a free-standing story; leaving the mystery of the daughter’s motivations unresolved was OK, as there were hints you could work out in your imagination. Still, I find a story of such unrelieved bleakness unsatisfying.
Not knowing why the daughter is unforgiving allows the reader to focus on the mother’s emotions rather than the misdeed. From the start, we become close with the mother potentially making her crime, when eventually revealed, more disappointing and tragic for the reader.