Rubble Children
Aaron Kreuter’s collection of short stories, “Rubble Children” explores a complex and multi-faceted Jewish presence in contemporary Canadian society. Kreuter succeeds with the character arcs to accomplish presenting a Jewish community of individuality that rejects polarity of a sorting that has taken place within societies for over a millennium. Jewish identity has historically and currently been dichotomized between pro-Israel or questioning the existence and actions of a Jewish state. As well, non-Jewish society follows afterwards facing the guillotine of sorting between pro-Israel stances or pro-Palestinian loyalties that we all know has established a serious divide in global formations. “Rubble Children” is a text that breaks down these painful constructs and can help facilitate movement towards a grey area of understanding of the complexities, open-mindedness and rationality needed to come through on the other side of the conflicts in Gaza, with heart. Essentially, we need heart to navigate these insanely deep-rifted fault lines of our global collective. “Rubble Children” can help do that.
“Rubble Children” connects characters subtly and sometimes directly across lives set in the backdrop of a fictional Reform synagogue, Kol B’Seder in a suburb of Thornhill. The reader is given glimpses of diverse Jewish lives navigating youth, identity, smoking, political concerns and love. The singularity and individuality of Kreuter’s characters working through their own conflicts ties in nicely with the central urban setting. The community is not homogenous and difference brings the reader again and again to edges of reflection and perspective on deeply-rooted and often intimidating topics like anti-Semitism, Zionism, Israel and the ongoing conflicts in Gaza. The timing of this collection offers a safe creative space for readers to explore ideas without judgement without conflict, resulting in the opportunity to walk in another’s shoes.
Aaron Kreuter teaches at Trent University and lives in Toronto. He has published four books and was shortlisted for the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for his poetry collection Shifting Baseline Syndrome.
In a reading of “Rubble Children” at Take Cover Books, Kreuter makes clear an authenticity needed to explore and present a multi-faceted, modern and historical Jewish collective in Canada. He strikes at the heart of difficult conversations around Palestine, Zionism, anti-Semitism and settler colonialism. He aims to “imagine a better world—Jewish, Palestinian, and otherwise.” Through character thought and dialogue, Kreuter traces the long-standing conflict in Gaza but establishes a wide lens on these tensions with a play on the title of the collection itself, “Rubble Children.” In a short story concerning a group of young girls pursuing their passion and almost obsession with Holocaust data, the girls form bonds and a community group under the name of “Rubble Children.” "What about if we call ourselves the rubble children?" "What does that mean?" “It is what Germans call the generation of babies born in Germany in spring '45." Children born of the rubble. Kreuter positions himself with the plotline of this enthralling story to show a broadening scope and understanding of other groups who are also rubble children by the girls. “We were so preoccupied with delving into our own people's open wound that we never, not for a second, considered that we could turn our flashlights out towards the world, to our own backyards.” Not only do the girls discover that there are other groups in society who have also suffered, they continue to suffer. “It happened. It can happen again. It is happening.” The characters, in turn, are pushed to evolve in looking beyond their circle to witness others striving to build a better world, others who are seeking to serve the next generation.
The stories create this deepening spiral of perspective that loops back around for the reader with different perspectives of Jewish identity and positioning within the world. In his reading at Take Cover Books Kreuter specifies that “it’s all these different imaginings of different ways Palestine could have turned out with the Jewish presence sort of scattered throughout.” Kreuter breaks conflation of Judaism to Zionism this way. He hopes that “a different Jewish world is possible.” I commend him for navigating such rifts and politically charged peaks of identity in a literary space. "Isn't it weird that in the whole chapter on violence in Judaism, they don't mention modern Israel once? It's all stories from the Bible." "Why is that weird?" "Because Israel's violent." "Israel has to be violent," Tasha said. Matt turned to her. "Like, I feel for the Palestinians, you know that, but it's their fault they're in this situation. They had plenty of opportunities for a state of their own. They're always the ones to start the violence. What choice do we have but to respond violently?" Israel, a presence for post-World War Two Jewish survivors that the Holocaust will not happen again, changes association with generations over time. “Jerusalem isn't a place Jerusalem is here Jerusalem is inside me. I am Jerusalem!”
One of my favourite pieces was not identified as a story but ‘A Dialogue.’ In a series of email correspondences, a Jewish writer is approached by a publication accepting a short story for their platform. Titled, “'TEL AVIV-TORONTO RED EYEN,” the dialogue slowly becomes unhinged and satirical in eventually forcing the writer to flatten out their original intentions of representing feeling and association within the diaspora to a typecast role and rigid box of caricature and stereotype of a Jewish identity in society. “Why, on page 3 of the story, does your narrator-who we assume, of course, is a thinly veiled version of your-self-say that she feels "more Jewish when on a plane flying home to Toronto from South Florida than when she's flying home from Tel Aviv?" I can't quite grasp what you're getting at here. Please advise.” This dialogue helped me to feel out in a reading space of empathy the pressures individuals are put through to conform and maintain homogeneity. In fact, speaking from the heart and individual lifelines requires bravery and a steadfastness to secure yourself within a world pushing identity constructs of what being Jewish means from the outside and from the inside.
This collection of stories is a necessary text, now. We will run with it and we will collide with it, but, considering the long-standing divides over Gaza, Israel and Palestine, this text will help facilitate crucial conversations and move dialogue forward in pushing us to connect with each other. The goal, Kreuter identifies in his final acknowledgement is a dedication of the pieces “for all the children who live and who die in the rubble; may we be held accountable, may we build a world without borders, without bombs, without rubble.” That would be ideal and it should be the baseline, a world without rubble children. Sadly, our baseline is war and conflict, normalized military complexes, desensitization and distance to societies of rubble and children suffering.
Thank you to Aaron Kreuter, University of Alberta Press and River Street Writing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.
Source
https://www.trentarthur.ca/news/trent-university-professor-aaron-kreuter-presents-rubble-children-at-take-cover-books
