When We Danced on Water
Evan Fallenberg, 2011
HarperCollins
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062033321
Summary
At eighty-five, Teo is ready to retire from the bombast and romance of life as one of the world's most influential choreographers. But when he meets Vivi, a fortyish waitress at a Tel Aviv cafe, the fires of his youth flare back to life—his passion for a woman's touch, his long-buried anguish at his wartime experiences, and his complex engagement with dance.
Vivi's life will change, too, as the warmth of Teo's affection counterbalances her harrowing time as an Israeli soldier in an illicit relationship. For both, their investment in art, and indeed in life itself, will reawaken as the ghosts of their suppressed pasts—from Warsaw to Copenhagen, Berlin to Tel Aviv—cry out for forgiveness and healing.
With lustrous prose capturing the grit and fury of history and the breathtaking power of passion, When We Danced on Water is a compelling novel of intimacy and identity, art and ambition, and how love can truly transcend tragedy. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Cleveland, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Georgetown University; M.F.A.,
Vermont College
• Awards—see below
• Currently—lives in Israel
Evan Fallenberg the author or two books: Light Fell (2008) and When We Danced on Water (2011).
Fallenberg's recent translations include Ron Leshem's Beaufort, Batya Gur's Murder in Jerusalem, Alon Hilu's Death of a Monk and The House of Dajani, and Meir Shalev's A Pigeon and a Boy, winner of the 2007 National Jewish Book Award for fiction and a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. Fallenberg is an instructor in the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University and heads his own Studio for Writers (and Readers) of English in the garden of his home. The recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship, Fallenberg is the father of two sons.
Fallenberg is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, a graduate of Georgetown University and the MFA program in creative writing at Vermont College. He has lived in Israel since 1985, where he writes, translates and teaches. His first novel, Light Fell, won the American Library Association's Barbara Gittings Stonewall Book Award for Literature and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and was shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award in fiction and a Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Quietly spectacular and emotionally satisfying...Fallenberg achieves the near-impossible, superbly crafting an altogether unique Holocaust story made plausible through utterly gripping realism.
Miami Herald
Lyrical...an enjoyable read...[Fallenberg is] sensitively attuned to the power of individual words. His fluid prose is carefully composed.
Jewish Post
Fallenberg's (Light Fell) precise prose moves fluidly between the delicate and the bold, much like the aging dancer whose story he tells with such elegance. At 84, Teo Levin commands the dancers performing his choreography in the Tel Aviv Ballet with an authority and vigor that belies his age. He looks forward to his daily arguments about devotion and passion with 42-year-old artist Vivi, the waitress at a cafe he frequents. Vivi, aimless in the years since she fled preunified Berlin, finds her focus with Teo, at last. In turn, she forces him to share the secrets he's locked away about a shocking six-year period he endured as a young man in Nazi Germany. Fallenberg gives voice to the miasma of grief that overwhelms Teo and Vivi and achieves resonance in his exploration of music as a visual and physical experience. The author also manages to spin mundane discussions of passion and obsession into a rich narrative, skirting sentimentality. His spare style sneaks up on the reader, enhancing the emotionality inherent in his subject.
Publishers Weekly
As their pasts are revealed, an unexpected blessing bears testament to the beauty and the sustainability of their unconventional relationship.
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss Teo's arc as an artist, and Vivi's. Where do they intersect? In what way are their artistic paths similar/dissimilar?
2. The line between passion and obsession is an issue with which When We Danced on Water grapples on several levels. Discuss.
3. Teo is characterized as someone who delves deeply into one art, while Vivi opts for breadth. Do you identify with one of these characteristics more than the other?
4. Time and place are very nearly characters in this book: 1920s Warsaw; pre-war Copenhagen and the Royal Danish Ballet; Berlin during World War II and in the 1980s; modern Tel Aviv. How did these settings affect your experience of reading When We Danced on Water?
5. In an early version of the novel, the scenes with Teo and Vivi together were written as a play (HE:, SHE:, stage directions instead of narration). Can you still feel something of that in the novel?
6. Did you find the writing about dance enriching or offputting?
7. Of all the main characters in this book (Teo, Vivi, Freddy, Margo, Nelly, Pincho) only Freddy is involved in a traditional family relationship. Discuss.
8. Do you consider Teo a victim of the Holocaust? Why/Why not?
9. In your opinion, who got more out of their relationship—Teo or Vivi?
10. On love: do you think that Freddy loved Teo? That Teo loved Freddy? That Teo loved Vivi? That Vivi loved Teo?
11. About Freddy, the writer Cynthia Ozick wrote that “together with all his ceaseless predatory impulses, many of them graphically and nightmarishly frightening, there is something rounded and human in Freddy: he is a complex villain.” Discuss.
12. Novels, like life, do not provide the ending to every aspect of every story and sub-plot. Of all the characters in When We Danced on Water, whose story-after-the-story most intrigues you?
13. Do you think this book has a happy ending? Why/Why not?
(Questions issued by publisher.)