A single-minded sister
Finding Ida by Marya Burgess. A guest post...
I’m excited to bring a guest post this week, from author Marya Burgess whose novel, Finding Ida, is based on the true story of her mother, Irena, and Irena’s sister, Alicja’s experiences in Poland in the 1930s. During her long career as a reporter and producer for BBC Radio, Marya made several attempts to tell her mother’s remarkable story. But it was only after moving to rural Scotland and getting a dog that Finding Ida finally took shape. When Marya told me it was approaching her mother’s story as a sister story that made everything fall into place, I had to know more.
Here’s Marya:
I always knew that my mother was different. She spoke with an accent, she cooked with garlic, and she fed us black rye bread and sauerkraut, sourced from the only delicatessen in north Kent back in the early 1960s.
Then there were the stories she told: of a childhood filled with ponies and swimming in a lake on her father’s estate near Warsaw. Of the vicious Nanny and the visits to the dressmaker; the hand-made shoes and gloves. Of playing in her father’s mill. And of an older sister, poised and elegant, whom she, the tomboy, adored. For a child growing up in a semi- outside Maidstone, with an active imagination and a love of pony books, her tales were seductively romantic.
As I grew older, the stories grew darker. The expansive, Chekhovian scenes of childhood were overlaid by the cruel constraints of life under German occupation, defined by a permanent anxiety over potential loss. And then the loss itself: The beautiful sister gone, along with her baby.
In the decades after the War, throughout the new life she built with my British soldier father, my mother never relented in her search for the truth about her sister’s fate. I was in my teens when that unlikely truth was finally revealed. Dramatic and seemingly impossible, it was a story I frequently related, with the inevitable response: It’s like a film – you’ve got to write the book!
And I tried. Throughout my journalistic career at the BBC, I made many attempts. But the heart of the story eluded me. I could outline the events, I knew every step of the search and the sequence of revelations, but how to make plausible something so inconceivable?
I have two brothers – twins who are nearly eight years older than me – yet I’ve been startled to realise, on more than one occasion, that I tune in to discussions concerning only children from the perspective of a singleton. From the age of six, after my brothers went away to school, I was the only child permanently at home. Among friends with large families, I observed the cut and thrust of inter-sibling warfare and intra-sibling loyalty with bemusement. I was alone, and my mother, a strong-willed survivor, seemed similarly so.
Even though she’d had a sister, I’d never seen them together, never witnessed my mother being half of anything; my father adored his wife and allowed her the leading role in their marriage. Redoubtable in her expectation that life – her own and that of those close to her – be lived on her terms, this made for serious conflict once I became a teenager and sought to make space for my own preferences and priorities.
After she died, I looked again at the various drafts I’d attempted in my efforts to tell her story. And something fell into place. Although it was about her sister, my mother always related it with such detachment that I’d never fully grasped what had fuelled her dogged search. Her formidable single-mindedness seemed to me to leave no room for compromise, for collaboration, for the need of another. Yet she’d had a sister. Having lost her own mother when still a child, and her father during the War, the sister, Alicja, was all that was left. Of her home, her history, her country – of everything she had been forced to leave behind.
And as soon as I recognised my mother’s longing for her sister, the story told itself. Alicja, the older, self-assured sibling whom she’d admired and aspired to be like, shaped her as much, if not more than the father she adored and the remote mother whom she lost tragically young. And later, when Alicja became vulnerable, my mother attempted to control the uncontrollable. I don’t think she ever stopped trying.
A sister allows for alignment as well as competition, loyalty as well as rivalry. Through the prism of sisterhood, the family dynamic came to life, the losses and the triumphs shared and reflected upon, supported through, mutually. As I wrote, I understood the petty, everyday squabbles as well as the over-arching allegiance which bound them. No wonder my mother was driven by an unappeasable need to find her sister: they’d been forged by the same history; no one else shared those memories.
In the same way that this understanding of my mother’s motivation allowed her story to fly, I believe the device of sisterhood has propelled literature and continues to do so. One needs only reference Sense and Sensibility and The Poisonwood Bible.
There are whole worlds between sisters. Undying love and blistering hatred, rivalry to the death as well as potential life sacrifice (the sharing of organs, the bearing of babies). Epic emotions, yet they fit comfortably within the domestic sphere. Yes, brothers have bonds, but their loyalties and rivalries tend to be played out on an epic scale. Of course, there’s the scope for this with sisters – many historic novels depend upon it. Yet, consider Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in a Castle, or Brit Bennet’s The Vanishing Half: through sisters, authors have chronicled major emotion in a penetrating minor key.
I’ve been enormously encouraged by readers who are themselves sisters, approving the accuracy and credibility of scenes between Luiza and Ida (the characters in my novel who are based on my mother and aunt). After all, with no sister of my own, all I had was guesswork and imagination.
Writing Finding Ida gave me an insight into a relationship I’d never previously longed for. And an understanding of my mother’s inexorable determination. It meant we regularly butted heads, but I can now appreciate that it also ensured she was an extraordinary sister.
Thank you, Marya, for so generously sharing this story and the photographs to go with it. If you’ve read the book, or now plan to, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
K x
It is a wonderful book! It will open your eyes about how sister-love can shape one’s life