{"id":19544,"date":"2018-01-10T16:44:09","date_gmt":"2018-01-10T21:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=19544"},"modified":"2018-01-10T16:44:09","modified_gmt":"2018-01-10T21:44:09","slug":"strangers-with-the-same-dream-explores-important-ideas-of-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/strangers-with-the-same-dream-explores-important-ideas-of-identity\/","title":{"rendered":"Strangers with the Same Dream explores important ideas of identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cReading.\u201d
\nIt was Alison Pick\u2019s answer to this writer\u2019s question, \u201cWhere do you find your inspiration?\u201d and an answer she freely admits \u201cmight sound like a boring response\u201d but that is often the case for the Man Booker Prize nominated author.
\nBut, although reading undoubtedly played a significant part in inspiring her latest novel, Strangers with the Same Dream, this year\u2019s One Book One Aurora selection, further inspiration came very close to home.
\nStrangers with the Same Dream follows the story of a diverse group of individuals in the 1920s who travel to what is now Israel to lay the foundations of a new life, an exercise in communal living. Through these disparate characters, Ms. Pick weaves a tapestry on the early foundations of Israel itself.
\nIt sheds light on the power of identity in a complex struggle, one that is still fraught today, but it also helped answer identity questions of her own.
\nMs. Pick only discovered her own Jewish roots as an adolescent and converted to the faith later in life.
\nHer father, she says, was Jewish but this is something she did not know until well into her formative years.
\nHis parents escaped Europe in 1939, with their own forebears dying in concentration camps, but those who escaped to the safety of North America faced different challenges.
\n\u201cWhen [my father\u2019s] parents got to Canada, the story I grew up with was they had been non-practicing, but one branch was non-practicing and the other quite practicing,\u201d says Ms. Pick. \u201cBut, in any case, Canada was anti-Semitic and they decided they would raise my dad and his brother as Christians. He only found out when he was 20 and touring a Jewish cemetery in Prague. In my family, there was almost no conversation about it. He knew, my mum knew, I grew up going to church and I found out by accident as an adolescent.\u201d
\nThe revelation was something of a game-changer for Ms. Pick but before it impacted her worldview, she says it had a more immediate impact on her personal identity.
\n\u201cIn a sense, my whole life made sense in a way it didn\u2019t before,\u201d she says about understanding things in a new family context. \u201cThere was so much secrecy in my family about it and it was a long process. There were lots of fraught conversations and my dad didn\u2019t want us to really talk about it while his mother was still alive because she was the one who was very adamant we were going to keep it a secret. Both her parents died in Auschwitz, she was a young woman when she came to Canada, and she just dealt with it by shutting down, I think.
\n\u201cAfter she passed away, the atmosphere in the family changed and there were years of struggling to understand who I was, my identity, and feeling very drawn to Judaism before actually converting. All of that happened before anything changed with my world view, and it was all very internal at first.\u201d
\nAlison Pick did not grow up with any burning desire to be a writer, opting to take an elective in creative writing during her undergraduate studies. She always loved reading, however, but eventually she was hit by a \u201cthunderbolt\u201d that she wanted to be a writer and never looked back.
\nShe eventually secured a grant and, with that money, took some time off from her job to write poetry. Luckily, she won a prestigious award for her efforts quite early on which extended her leave by a further six months.
\nThis question of identity is something Ms. Pick explored in her 2010 book, Far to Go, the Booker Prize-nominated novel inspired by her grandparents\u2019 fleeing of Czechoslovakia in 1939. It was explored further in her own memoir Between Gods.
\n\u201cHaving done both recently, the line between memoir and fiction is thinner than we like to think, the categories are not as distinct,\u201d she says, comparing the writing process between the two genres. \u201cI was prepared to find them extremely different for various reasons, but you\u2019re using the same toolkit.\u201d
\nEarly on in the exploration of her identity, Ms. Pick says she was told that one couldn\u2019t fully understand what it means to be Jewish until one visited Israel, an idea she brushed off as \u201csilly\u201d at first blush.
\nThat was then, but after several trips to Israel since that conversation, she sees the wisdom in the statement.
\n\u201cIt was a way for me to understand the psychology of the early Zionists and the seeds of what is happening in the Middle East today,\u201d she says. \u201cThat said, the main thing I am interested in is the characters. I think if you\u2019re writing historical fiction, if it is set in a time and place that is very dramatic, that is the backdrop and the reader will bring a sense of foreboding, or dread to that, or curiosity. As the writer, you\u2019re focusing on what is happening between the characters.
\n\u201cThe reader brings themselves [to a book] and that is one of the exciting things about art in general, and literature in particular, to me: the diversity of things people come away with. I like to read a book without reading the back cover if I can because I think the less you know the deeper your reading experience might be.\u201d<\/p>\n

To find your own experience, look for copies of Strangers with the Same Dream. The book is available for purchase now from all booksellers, with paperbacks set to appear in small pop-up lending libraries all around Aurora starting this summer. For more information on One Book One Aurora 2018, including the growing list of activities and discussions surrounding the themes of the book, visit www.onebookoneaurora.com.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cReading.\u201d
\nIt was Alison Pick\u2019s answer to this writer\u2019s question, \u201cWhere do you find your inspiration?\u201d and an answer she freely admits \u201cmight sound like a boring response\u201d but that is often the case for the Man Booker Prize nominated author.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19524,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[27,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-and-culture","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/2018-01-11-06.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-55e","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-22 07:15:48","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19544\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}