Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Waiting Room
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://leahkaminsky.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Australian
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/11/leah_kaminsky_s_the_waiting_room_reviewed.html * http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-waiting-room-review-leah-kaminsky-and-the-migrant-dilemma-in-israel-20150930-gjy8ue.html * https://wordmothers.com/2016/01/12/interview-with-author-leah-kaminsky/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1959; married; children: three, including a daughter.
EDUCATION:Earned M.D. degree; attended New York University and RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia; Vermont College of Fine Arts, M.F.A., 2013.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Physician in Haifa, Israel, c. 1992-2002; Elwood Family Clinic, Melbourne, Australia, general practitioner of medicine, beginning 2012; writer, 2012-. Morbid Anatomy Museum, Brooklyn, NY, inaugural writer in residence, 2014; Jewish Holocaust Research Centre, writer in residence; gives readings at festivals, workshops, and cafés.
AWARDS:Eleanor Dark Flagship resident fellowship for fiction, Varuna National Writers House, 2007.
RELIGION: Jewish.WRITINGS
Contributor of articles, stories, poems, and reviews to periodicals, including Age (Melbourne, Australia), Antipodes, Australian Jewish News, Griffith Review, Islet, Quadrant, Scribblers on the Roof, and Up the Staircase Literary Review. Poetry and fiction editor, Medical Journal of Australia.
SIDELIGHTS
Leah Kaminsky was a writer before she became a physician, but she put aside her literary aspirations to concentrate on medicine. The Australian native moved to Israel with her husband and established a medical practice in Haifa while nurturing a growing family. In 2002 she returned to Australia and opened a general practice in Melbourne. There, in the city where she grew up, the doctor revived her dream of becoming a writer.
Kaminsky pursued a fine arts degree at New York University and continued her creative studies at RMIT University. She published occasional short stories and poems, and in 2010 she released the poetry collection Stitching Things Together. The connections between medicine and creative writing continued to fascinate her, and Kaminsky began to read the creative work of other physicians.
The Writer-M.D.
Writer, M.D.: The Best Contemporary Fiction and Nonfiction by Doctors contains some of Kaminsky’s favorite selections from the contributions she requested from her colleagues around the world. Virtually all of the ten essays and six short stories have been published elsewhere, but here in one volume readers can explore a wide range of topics. Kaminsky told an interviewer at Signature: “I wanted these stories to reveal something about what emotional price doctors often pay in their attempt to keep a professional distance.” She wanted readers to “discover that their doctors are human.”
In one story, a pediatrician describes the traumatic impact of her first dissection of a human cadaver. Another recalls the intensive-care supervisor whose arrogant, rude, and coarse persona conceals the devastating emotional vulnerability of a caring human being who lost a patient. A psychiatrist writes of a World War II veteran with Korsakoff syndrome whose chronic memory disorder has left him stranded in 1945. In the fiction category, Kaminsky includes her own story of a Baha’i woman whose torture at the hands of a Muslim extremist offers a life lesson to the doctor hearing her story.
Rheta Van Winkle shared at BookLoons: “I particularly enjoyed the true stories, which give the reader a chance to experience medical situations from the doctor’s point of view. Booklist contributor Donna Chavez reported: “Each little gem begs for more of the same.” At Blogcritics, however, Rhetta Akamatsu observed: “All of the pieces in this book focus on death or grave trauma”; the volume “desperately needs some pieces that showcase hope and life as well as despair.”
The Waiting Room
Thus inspired—and armed with a fine arts degree from Vermont College of Fine Arts—Kaminsky completed a novel that had simmered in the back of her mind for years. Although she has stated that The Waiting Room is not an autobiographical novel, she readily acknowledges that she and her protagonist, Dina, share several identifiers. Kaminsky is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp who immigrated to Australia after World War II. Kaminsky is a physician whose love for her husband prompted her to trade Melbourne for Haifa during a period of intense Palestinian-Israeli conflict. During her ten years there, Kaminsky had a keen sense of the uneasy aura surrounding this city in which, despite its cultural diversity, terror could strike at any moment. Finally, it was her own waiting room that gave life to many of the characters that Dina encountered in one fateful day.
The year is 2001. Dina is pregnant, her marriage is troubled, and the city of Haifa is functioning under a terror alert. She is also haunted—stalked—by the ghost of her mother, a Holocaust survivor of Bergen-Belsen whose nagging voice penetrates her every thought. Dina is a doctor, though, so she drives her son to school and greets the patients in her waiting room just as she does on every other workday. She must tell a Christian Palestinian woman that her belly is swollen not by a growing baby, but by a malignant mass. She mollifies a hypochondriac Russian immigrant. She panics at the vision of an Arab suicide bomber at her son’s school, who turns out to be the friendly playground candy man.
Dina’s every moment is suffused with fear and every heartbeat amplified by the insistent voice of her mother. In the Newtown Review of Books, Tracy Sorensen called The Waiting Room a novel “about what happens to people when they have been marinated in horror” and claimed that Dina is suffering from “a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder by proxy.” The tension mounts as it dawns on the reader that there will be no happy ending for Dina. Kaminsky told interviewer Stuart Waterman at the Rumpus: “I didn’t want this book to be a political statement,” but “you can’t escape the political reality of the Middle East.”
A Kirkus Reviews contributor hinted that “Kaminsky may have bitten off more than she can chew,” but others were moved by Dina’s anguish. “Dina has … to choose between Melbourne and Haifa … , love or terror,” Anne Susskind wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald; “Kaminsky’s book throws up some tough questions.” Ilana Masad observed at Slate: “It’s possible to read through the lines of The Waiting Room to analyze Israeliness, xenophobia, Holocaust, trauma, and more.” “Sometimes it’s all a little bit too much,” mentioned Sorensen, but Saadia Faruqi reminded readers at the New York Journal of Books that “stories like these are important. They help us heal, and they help us understand why people do inexplicable things.”
We're All Going to Die
Kaminsky admits to a lifelong fear of death, despite the fact that it is a doctor’s frequent companion. In We’re All Going to Die: A Joyful Book about Death, “she argues that facing what makes us so afraid will make us less afraid,” according to Margaret Rice’s review in the Sydney Morning Herald. Kaminsky points out the potential consequences of failing to confront the fear, as Sorensen noted in the Newtown Review of Books: “failing to connect emotionally” with our dying friends and family members, spending “ridiculous amounts of money” for useless medical interventions, and failing to make “the practical arrangements” that could spare those we leave behind “a lot of confusion and heartache.” Kaminsky divides her book into chapters on “child mortality, health anxiety, near-death experience, living with loss, and exploring the idea of a ‘good death,’” among other topics, reported Andrew McMillen in the Australian, illustrating each with examples from her practice and her life.
Kaminsky tells the story of her own mother, who survived Bergen-Belsen and lived with the pain of her memories long enough to raise her children, then ended them with an intentional overdose of prescription medication. Then there is Ray, who refuses to acknowledge his own increasingly imminent death by surrounding himself with the life and love of his many backyard pets. Melanie tries to fend off death with plastic surgeries until she discovers a brain tumor that cannot be mended by cosmetic intervention. When Michael is faced with the same inevitable end from a different cancer, he embraces it by hosting a party to celebrate his love for all of the important people in his life. “This is where we find the joy,” Sorensen explained. “Love is an answer to Death.” Robin Osborne, writing at the website of the Northern Rivers General Practice Network, found We’re All Going to Die to be “well written, brimming with empathy …, and sharply analytical about the barriers and prejudices” of an aging population. McMillen, too, found that Kaminsky “has a deft touch with her pen, striking a dual pose of authority and warmth,” ending the book with a “poignant … final scene,” leaving it to each reader to experience on his or her own.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 15, 2011, Donna Chavez, review of Writer, M.D.: The Best Contemporary Fiction and Nonfiction by Doctors, p. 9.
Cosmos, June-July, 2015, Bill Condie, review of Cracking the Code.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2016, review of The Waiting Room.
Library Journal, December 1, 2011, Rachael Dreyer, review of Writer, M.D., p. 123.
ONLINE
Australian, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/ (June 18, 2016), Andrew McMillen, review of We’re All Going to Die.
Australian Book Review, https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/ (June 30, 2017), John Funder, review of We’re All Going to Die.
Blogcritics, http://blogcritics.org/ (November 9, 2011), Rhetta Akamatsu, review of Writer, M.D.
BookLoons, http://www.bookloons.com/ (June 30, 2017), Rheta Van Winkle, review of Writer, M.D.
Cosmos Online, https://cosmosmagazine.com/ (July 6, 2015), Bill Condie, review of Cracking the Code.
Jewish Book Council Website, http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/ (November 11, 2016), Leah Kaminsky, “On Waiting.”
Leah Kaminsky Website, http://leahkaminsky.com (June 30, 2017).
Newtown Review of Books, http://newtownreviewofbooks.com.au/ (September 3, 2015), Tracy Sorensen, review of The Waiting Room; (August 2, 2016), Tracy Sorensen, review of We’re All Going to Die.
New York Journal of Books, http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (June 30, 2017), Saadia Faruqi, review of The Waiting Room.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (December 1, 2016), Stuart Waterman, author interview.
Signature, http://www.signature-reads.com/ (January 21, 2012), author interview.
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (November 8, 2016), Ilana Masad, review of The Waiting Room.
Sydney Morning Herald Online, http://www.smh.com. au/ (May 2, 2015), Dianne Dempsey, review of Cracking the Code; (October 10, 2015), Anne Susskind, review of The Waiting Room; (July 29, 2016), Margaret Rice, review of We’re All Going to Die.
WordMothers, https://wordmothers.com/ (January 12, 2016), Nicole Melanson, author interview.
Meet Leah Kaminsky
By Nicole Melanson ¶ Posted in Fiction, Interviews with Writers ¶ Tagged australian literature, author interview, cracking the code, leah kaminsky, the waiting room, we're all going to die, writer interview ¶ 8 Comments
Interview by Nicole Melanson ~
Interview with writer Leah Kaminsky by Nicole Melanson - photo by Nicola Bernardi
Leah Kaminsky, a physician and award-winning writer, is Poetry & Fiction Editor at the Medical Journal of Australia. Her debut novel, The Waiting Room, is published by Vintage (2015) and will be released by Harper Perennial US in 2016. We’re all Going to Die, a ‘joyful book about death’, is forthcoming with Harper Collins in June 2016.
Leah conceived and edited Writer MD, a collection of prominent physician-writers, which starred on Booklist (Knopf US 2012). She is co-author of Cracking the Code, with the Damiani family (Vintage 2015). Her poetry collection Stitching Things Together was highly commended in the IP Picks Award and is published by IP Press. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Leah Kaminsky’s website
Leah on Facebook
Twitter: @leahkam
Leah on LinkedIn
Writer Leah Kaminsky Book Cover - The Waiting Room
The Waiting Room by Leah Kaminsky
HOW DID YOU GET STARTED?
My first ever publication was a poem called “The Royal Beetle Bug” in grade 3 — it even had the word ‘psychedelic’ in it. I’ve always loved writing but it wasn’t till I was 21 and runner-up for a short story competition at university that I started to dream about becoming a professional writer. I had to put that on hold till I finished my medical studies. Then a close friend told me about the NYU Summer Writers’ Conference and invited me to stay in his apartment so I could attend. I leapt at the offer and ended up starting an MFA at NYU. Not long after though, my father took ill and I had to fly back home.
I was accepted into the Professional Writing and Editing Program at RMIT and pitched my first feature article to The Age. I freelanced for various publications. I also published poetry and short stories, and had a couple of children’s picture books commissioned. My then agent, the lovely Caroline Lurie, secured me a deal for my first book back in 1991. My biggest break came in 2007 when I won the Eleanor Dark Flagship Fellowship for Fiction at Varuna.
WHAT IS YOUR LATEST BOOK OR CURRENT PROJECT?
I’ve had an extraordinarily lucky year, with contracts for three books. The most recent was my debut novel The Waiting Room, published by Vintage Australia, due out in the US & Canada with Harper Perennial in 2016. June 2016 also sees the release of We’re All Going to Die, ‘a joyful book about death’. It’s a creative non-fiction book exploring death denial in modern society, through the lens of my role as a physician.
WHAT IS YOUR WORK ENVIRONMENT LIKE?
Chaotic! I don’t have a dedicated place to work in, so I’m fairly nomadic — libraries, cafes (I carry earplugs in my bag!) — I’ve even been known to close the door to the bathroom at home and write there if I have a crazy deadline. I spread out on the dining room table and work while my kids are studying. Various fellowships have given me precious time and space to write in beautiful places like the State Library, Glenfern or Varuna. I prefer solitude and quiet when I’m working on a first draft of anything. I’d love a studio at home, but I’ve learnt not to wait for the perfect conditions to write or I’d never get anything done.
Leah Kaminsky in a bookstore - photo by Nicola Bernardi
WHEN DO YOU WORK? WHAT DOES A TYPICAL DAY LOOK LIKE?
When I’m not at the clinic, I drop my youngest daughter at school and aim to sit down and write by 9am, but often the dog is itching for a walk or the cat jumps up onto my laptop and starts licking his belly and demanding attention. I get distracted so easily and have to force myself not to check social media and emails while I’m writing. But once I’ve managed to settle down and am ‘in the zone’, it’s as if I’m in some kind of trance and nothing beyond the page exists. The day passes quickly and after I’ve had a break for lunch, hung out some washing and put on the dinner, 3pm rolls around quickly and I’m out the door again for school pick-up.
Leah Kaminsky's cat, Kotzy
Leah’s cat, Kotzy
WHAT IS YOUR WRITING PROCESS?
It took me a long time to understand that my writing process is a very messy, organic one. I always write a first draft of anything in long-hand and only then edit on a computer. I circle around ideas, writing scenes or snippets of dialogue and am never sure how it all hangs together until the very late stages of a work.
When I was at NYU I was fortunate enough to hear E L Doctorow speak. He said: ‘Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ That’s how I feel when I am creating a new work — I have an idea and then I am curious to see in which direction my pen will lead me. The story invites me in at the start and I am compelled to follow as it gradually reveals itself.
When I was doing my MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts in the US, novelist Richard Bausch ran a masterclass in which he gave students three brilliant words of wisdom: JUST TURN UP. If you sit in front of the page for an hour or two every day, you’ll inevitably write something. At least there are some words to work with then — you can’t edit a blank page.
WHY DO YOU DO WHAT YOU DO?
It is a part of me; words are like breath. I cannot imagine my life without writing and reading. It helps me make sense of the world — both my awe of its incredible beauty, as well as my horror at how easily we screw it up.
WHO OR WHAT INSPIRES YOU?
Reading is my greatest inspiration, especially poetry. I always have poetry books on my desk and if I feel stuck I turn to them. My best ideas have come either while I’m reading or daydreaming. It’s always when I let my guard down after struggling and agonizing over some work that something magical appears out of nowhere. Often this happens while I’m in the shower though, and I have no way of jotting it down.
As a doctor I have been so privileged to meet such a wide range of people who have shared their wisdom, vulnerability and courage with me over the years. Each patient is a walking poem.
I have also been incredibly blessed to have writers I deeply admire encourage me along the way — the list is way too long, but I have to tip my hat to Tom Keneally, Geraldine Brooks, Jerome Groopman and Graeme Simsion, amongst others. I’ve been lucky to learn from the greats along my writer’s journey. And my children and husband have been the best ideas people, editors, coaches and cooks.
The Waiting Room launch with Graeme Simsion
The Waiting Room launch with Graeme Simsion
WHAT IS THE HARDEST PART OF WHAT YOU DO?
Finding enough time for writing while juggling my busy life as a doctor and a mother of three. Carmel Bird gave me some sage advice when I was a young writer at RMIT — ‘Give up the housework’. I’ve heeded her words — our place is always a mess.
WHAT DO YOU WISH YOU HAD KNOWN WHEN YOU STARTED?
That you need to be courageous, believe in yourself, take risks with your writing and most of all, be persistent. I wish I’d had more confidence in myself when I was starting out and not felt despondent when someone didn’t engage with my writing or I received a rejection. The process of writing is not the same as the business of writing and I would have saved myself a lot of heartache if I’d learned to separate the two early on in my career.
WHAT IS YOUR ARTISTIC OR PROFESSIONAL VISION?
I’ve been lucky enough to sign contracts for three books within six months in 2015, so I can’t be greedy. Even so, most writers I’ve spoken to, whether emerging or established, are always looking towards their next goal. Mine is to finish another novel based on a true story which requires a ton of research. I’m also completing a hybrid non-fiction book that weaves biography with memoir.
We have such talented and diverse writers here in Australia — I’d love to see more of them achieve wider international recognition. I’d also love to see writers and editors being paid decently for the incredible work they do. I don’t think the reading public understands how so many beautiful books are put together on such shoestring budgets.
WHO ARE YOUR FAVORITE FEMALE AUTHORS?
I have so many, but if I had to choose just a few, they would be Anne Enright, Anne Michaels, Sharon Olds and Marie Howe. Aussie gals I hugely admire are Lee Kofman, Clare Wright, Alison Goodman and Geraldine Brooks.
WHICH FEMALE AUTHORS WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE INTERVIEWED ON WORDMOTHERS NEXT?
Oh, my — how to choose? Catherine Therese, Alice Nelson, Geraldine Brooks, Suzanne Koven, Catherine Buni, Tania Hershman, Jacinta Halloran.
Thank you, Leah Kaminsky!
— Nicole Melanson
And thank you, Lee Kofman, for recommending Leah! Read Lee’s WordMothers interview here
About Leah
Leah Kaminsky, a physician and award-winning writer, is Poetry & Fiction Editor at the Medical Journal of Australia.
Her debut novel The Waiting Room is published by Vintage (2015) and will be released by Harper Perennial US in 2016. We’re all Going to Die is forthcoming with Harper Collins in June 2016. She conceived and edited Writer MD, a collection of prominent physician-writers, which starred on Booklist (Knopf US 2012). She is co-author of Cracking the Code, with the Damiani family (Vintage 2015). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
To enquire about booking Leah as a speaker for an event, visit http://bookedout.com.au/find-a-speaker/author/dr-leah-kaminsky/
ADDED BY SKETCHWRITER:
WINNER of the Voss Literary Prize, 2016
The Waiting Room unfolds over the course of a single, life-changing day, but the story it tells spans five decades, three continents, and one family’s compelling history of love, war, and survival.
As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Dina’s present has always been haunted by her parents’ pasts. She becomes a doctor, emigrates, and builds a family of her own, yet no matter how hard she tries to move on, their ghosts keep pulling her back. A dark, wry sense of humor helps Dina maintain her sanity amid the constant challenges of motherhood and medicine, but when a terror alert is issued in her adopted city, her coping skills are pushed to the limit. Interlacing the present and the past over a span of twenty-four hours, The Waiting Room is an intense exploration of what it means to endure a day-to-day existence defined by conflict and trauma, and a powerful reminder of just how fragile life can be. As the clock counts down to a shocking climax, Dina must confront her parents’ history and decide whether she will surrender to fear, or fight for love.
Awards
Griffith Review Contributers’ Circle Award for novel Ice Theory, February 2016
Awarded a RMIT University nonfiction Lab Mccraith House Writers’ Residency at The Butterfly House, December 2015
DISQUIET – SLS Finalist Fellowship, awarded April 2015 for novel Ice Theory
Inaugural Writer-in-Residence, Morbid Anatomy Museum, Brooklyn, November 2014
The Waiting Room shortlisted for William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition 2013
Readings Glenfern Fellowship for an Established Writer (for CNF manuscript ‘We’re All Going to Die’) 2013
Writer in Residence – Jewish Holocaust Research Centre
Hippocrates Poetry & Medicine Prize 2012
The Fish Council awarded the Varuna/Pan MacMillan Publisher’s Fellowship 2012
The Fish Council awarded a New Work Grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council 2012
Stitching Things Together commended in Anne Elder Award 2011
Billilla Studio/Bayside Council Writer-in-Residence Award 2010-2011
State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship 2010 – $12,500 grant for research for creative non-fiction book The Fish Council
CAL Cultural Trust Development Fund – $3,000 to attend MFA (Fiction) Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpellier, Vermont USA 2010-11
Summer Literary Seminars Competition 2010 – merit scholarship award
Glenfern Studio Residency 2010 – awarded by Grace Marion Wilson Trust & Victorian Writers’ Centre
Highly Commended IP Picks Poetry Competition 2010
2nd place winner Angelo B. Natoli short story award 2010 (Fellowship of Australian Writers) for The Cat Feeders
Accepted to MFA program (Fiction) at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpellier, USA 2010.
CAL/Scribe Fiction Award 2009, The Waiting Room long listed
Penguin/Varuna Development Scholarship 2009, The Waiting Room nominated
Varuna Publishers Award 2009 shortlisted for The Waiting Room
Café Poet in Residence 2009-2010, Australian Poetry Centre (Café Loco, Elsternwick)
Writing@Rosebank Residential Writing Fellowship 2010 (Victorian Writers’ Centre)
selected for Iowa Summer Writers’ Graduate Workshop 2009 – with director Lan Samantha Chang
Grace Marion Wilson Trust – Fiction Masterclass with Antoni Jach 2009
Writer in Residence Shaindy Rudoff Graduate School in Creative Writing 2008
Creation Grant – Arts Victoria 2008 for development of final draft of novel The Waiting Room
Emerging Writers’ Grant – Literature Board of Australia, 2008 for development of final draft of novel
Max Harris Poetry Awards 2008 – commended
John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award 2007 – Second Place (FAW national literary awards)
Winner Eleanor Dark Flagship Fellowship for Fiction – Varuna 2007
Victorian Ministry of the Arts: Writers’ Project Grant 1989 – for work on novel
Shortlisted for ASA Mentorship programme 2007 (top 10 fiction writers out of 500 total applicants)
Runner-up of Reading’s Fellowship –Writers’ Studio at Glenfern Writers’ Centre, Melbourne Oct 2006 – June 2007
Poetry
Eucalyptus Dreaming in Anthology ‘Forever Eve’, NCJW. 2002
The Turtle Comes Up for Air & Letter to William Carlos Williams in Quadrant Magazine ed Les Murray 2007
My Father Crosses Acland Street, 1987 – John Shaw Neilson Poetry Award 2007 – Second Place (Federation of Australian Writers national literary awards) also published in prizewinners anthology
The Envelope Please, 2007
Here and There, 1991 Cordite Review 2008
Stitching Things Together – Max Harris Poetry Awards 2008 – commended
Mr Potato Head & the Middle East Crisis – poem of the month January 2010, Australian Poetry Centre website
Stitching Things Together – February 2010, Up the Staircase Literary Review, USA
Still Life with Children forthcoming December 2010, Antipodes USA
How to Lumbar Puncture a Child forthcoming CHEST, Pectoriloquy, USA 2010
Days of Usefulness forthcoming Islet magazine, 2010
Dealing the Cards & Shivering Wings of a Bee forthcoming Divan 2010
Stitching Things Together selected for Varuna-Picaro Anthology 2010
Short Stories
Please Gawd filmed and presented at Hamer Hall, Melbourne Arts Centre 23/4/2007
Vacant Possession – commissioned by Linden Gallery, (catalogue for Phobia Exhibition) 2009
Silent Night in Scribblers on the Roof, USA 2009
Tahirih in Transnational Literature, Volume 2, Issue 1, November 2009 (http://dspace.flinders.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2328/7939/1/Tahirih.pdf)
Literary Non-Fiction Articles
The Age: Article on Happiness 18/03/2017
The Griffith Review May 2012 ‘The Fish Council’
The Griffith Review 2011 ‘Tunnel Vision of the Soul’
A Land of Milk, Blood & Tears in The Age March 2002 – piece about living in Israel during the intifada.
Saint or Sinner interview Tom Keneally, Australian Jewish News 2008
Interview with Ethan Canin, Australian Jewish News August 2009
Regular Columns
Matters of the Heart in The Australian Jewish News 2006-2009
Profiles
GP Research in Australian Doctor 11/2005
Book Reviews
Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande, January, 201
Readings
Molly Bloom’s Readings (FAW) April 2002
Sydney Jewish Writers’ Festival 2008 – on panel with Arnold Zable & Diane Armstrong
Tmol Shilshom reading with Evan Fallenberg. 31/12/2008. Jerusalem.
Tashmadada’s Director’s Cut – Café Loco & ACMI lounge, 2009
Baby Black Café, 20/12/2009 poetry reading with Jennie Fraine
Storytelling at the Dog’s Bar St Kilda June 17th 2010
Conferences
Doctor’s Who Workshop at Varuna March 10th 2012 cofacilitator with Dr Hilton Koppe
RACGP Women’s Conference 23/4/2006 – I ran a weekend creative writing workshop for doctors
Advanced Poetry Workshop with Les Murray at the Victorian Writer’s Centre 29/3/2007
Grace Marion Wilson Masterclass 2009 for published writers, headed by writer and teacher Antoni Jach
Panel Chair – Melbourne Writers’ Festival August 2009. Pen vs Stethoscope , with panelists Ethan Canin, Peter Goldsworty and Jacinta Halloran (physician-writers)
Organised visit of Robin Hemley to Varuna and Victorian Writeres’ Centre for creative non-fiction masterclass and workshop December 2009
Organised evening Lee Gutkind in Conversation with Peter Bishop at Glenfern Writers’ Centre June 2010 (Tashmadada in conjunction with VWC)
Writing and the Body workshop – Victorian Writers’ Centre forthcoming 4/12/2010
Films
Australian Story – Cracking the Code, October 2014
Interview by Dr Grant Blashki for RACGP for video Men & Suicide
Please Gawd -short film by director Deborah Leiser Moore and filmmaker Guy Dvir Ovadia of writer presenting her short story. Screened at Victorian Arts Centre, 23/4/2007
© 2016 Leah Kaminsky
Agent Contact
USA
Todd Shuster
Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency
1776 Broadway Suite 1405, New York, New York 10019
Experience
Elwood Family Clinic writer and GP
Company Name Elwood Family Clinic
Dates Employed Aug 2002 – Mar 2012 Employment Duration 9 yrs 8 mos
Location Melbourne, Australia
Education
Vermont College of Fine Arts
Degree Name Master's degree
Field Of Study Creative Writing
Dates attended or expected graduation 2011 – 2013
MFA in Fiction
On Waiting
Friday, November 11, 2016| Permalink
Earlier this week, Leah Kaminsky considered the power of inanimate objects and speaking to ghosts in contemporary literature—as in her own novel, The Waiting Room. Leah has been guest blogging for the Jewish Book Council all week as part of the Visiting Scribe series here on The ProsenPeople.
I hate waiting. I’m that person at checkout in the supermarket who hops from line to line impatiently, emerging at the other end eventually, having taken twice as long to get through. If my dentist is running more than fifteen minutes late, I pace around glowering at the poor receptionist, silently furious that no one called me to say he was behind schedule. I get annoyed if my flight has been delayed, resorting to Twitter to vent my frustration against the airline. I can never understand how the people around me appear so calm, lounging around on chairs, deeply engrossed in reading a book, or phlegmatically playing Candy Crush on their phone. If the postponement of gratification is a sign of maturity, then when it comes to waiting I am that toddler in the aisle having a meltdown. Not only do I hate having my time sucked from me, but the demoralizing uncertainty of not knowing how long I will need to wait has me on shpilkes.
How ironic then that someone as impatient as I should take ten (make that thirty) years to write her debut novel. I have imbued my main character, Dina, with my own traits of waiting-angst. She is an ex-pat who visits Israel on a whim: “As soon as she set foot in Ben Gurion airport for the first time, she felt oddly enfolded in familiarity… the line inside passport control reminded her of a crowd of Melbourne Jews waiting for bagels at Glicks Bakery on Carlisle Street every Sunday morning; not really a line, more a schmear of generic impatience.” She fantasizes about having “plastic strap-on elbows to push her way through the strangely endearing organized chaos.” She falls in love, and ends up staying.
The Waiting Room resisted being corralled inside the confines of a book jacket for a very long time. The idea for the novel came to me soon after my mother died. I wanted to write about her extraordinary experiences as a survivor of Bergen-Belsen. She was twenty-one years old when she was liberated, the sole survivor of her entire family. Arriving in Australia as a refugee, she went on to rebuild her life, working, marrying, and raising a family, wrapping us all in a protective shield of love. Yet when I started writing about her after her death, much to my shame, I could only remember snippets of her stories. I had been a reluctant listener as a teenager, running from her haunted past.
It took almost twenty years before I had the courage to tackle the book again. I was already a doctor; I had met my husband and moved to Israel, where we were bringing up three young children. As I struggled to adjust to my new home, a new language, and the demands of day-to-day life, the only writing I managed was scribbling notes in a journal. Many of these observations would become the bedrock from which my novel sprouted—still inspired by my mother’s story, but also by my new experiences as an immigrant.
After a few years I had a pile of scenes, but no overarching narrative or structure to pin them on. Being such an impatient person, I began to feel very frustrated. I met the wonderful author David Grossman after reading his powerful novel See Under: Love. I shared my angst about the book with him. He explained that when he sets out to write a novel he knows almost nothing about it and it is only in the final stages that the story starts to congeal. “I need the story to surprise me, betray me, take me to places I’m afraid to go usually,” he said. In his experience, a novel-in-progress often behaves like a cunning carpet-merchant: “It unrolls and unfolds dozens of colorful carpets, and I’m tempted very easily.”
Grossman’s process intrigued me. At the time, though, I did not realize that I am also the sort of writer who needs to write in order to find out what I am writing, so The Waiting Room limped along at a painstakingly slow pace.
“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way,” E.L. Doctorow once wrote. I persevered in my writing, trying out various structures, but was still totally lost in the narrative woods. The story spanned three continents, three eras, and had a dozen characters. Just as I was ready to give up, a friend encouraged me to apply for an MFA at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. I was paired with an advisor in the second half of the program, Clint McCown, who was a brilliant, softly spoken Southern writer. He accurately diagnosed me of a “fear of finishing”—this novel had been with me for so many years that I almost didn’t want to let go of it. McCown soon became the perfect antidote to my angst-ridden, impatient inner critic, and I started to find my writing mojo again. He encouraged me to develop the ghostly presence of my protagonist’s mother, who eventually grew into a major character in the novel. From there, it didn’t take long then to tame the manuscript into the shape of a novel. After another year of careful editing, under the guidance of my American agent Todd Shuster, I finally felt ready to show it to publishers. Then, within a couple of weeks, after all those years as a work-in-progress, The Waiting Room finally found a home. The wait was finally over.
Leah Kaminsky is a physician and author, whose books include We’re All Going to Die, Writer MD, and Cracking the Code. She is the poetry editor for the Medical Journal of Australia.
THE RUMPUS MINI-INTERVIEW PROJECT #60: LEAH KAMINSKY
BY STUART WATERMAN
December 1st, 2016
Leah Kaminsky’s debut novel, The Waiting Room, depicts one fateful day in the life of an Australian doctor and mother, Dina, living in Haifa, Israel. Dina is trying to maintain normalcy as she goes about her work as a family doctor, cares for her son, and fights to preserve her faltering relationship with her husband, with whom she’s expecting a daughter. But the day is anything but normal: the city is on high alert, living under a heightened threat of terror, and Dina is followed everywhere by the talkative and opinionated ghost of her mother, who is deceased but was a survivor of the Holocaust and whose history weighs heavily on the protagonist. As these pressures converge on her, Dina faces dramatic tests to her resilience—and even her life.
In addition to being a writer, Kaminsky is a medical doctor, living in Australia. She is an editor at the Medical Journal of Australia. Her publication history includes the anthology, conceived and edited by her, Writer, M.D.: The Best Contemporary Fiction and Nonfiction by Doctors (Knopf 2012). She holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
***
The Rumpus: One strong aspect of this novel is how vividly you capture the setting of Haifa, Israel, conveying not only physicality but also a atmosphere. Can you tell me about the decision to set this story in Haifa, and how you managed to write about it convincingly from a great geographical distance (my understanding is that you live in Australia)? What combination of research, travel, imagination, and other things made it possible.
Leah Kaminsky: People often ask me if The Waiting Room has autobiographical elements, and as far as setting goes, it definitely has, from the smell of bourekas and donuts in the marketplace, to the stray cats lovingly fed by someone in every neighborhood. I lived and worked there as a doctor for ten years, and I guess this novel is trying to capture the vibrancy of the city in the background of the story I’m telling. Haifa is a place where disparate cultures have more or less managed to co-exist in relative harmony—amongst them, Baha’is, Druze, Christians, Muslims, Ahmadiyya, immigrants from the former Soviet Union, as well as Anglo and Ethiopian Jews. The plurality of Haifa has always interested me. The action of the novel takes place over one day—a day when there is the very real threat of a terror attack, shattering the idyllic notion of Haifa as a model of coexistence and peace in the Middle East.
My three children were born in Haifa, so it was a very busy period of my life. I only had time to write journals, which I filled with reflections and snippets about the sights, smells, sounds and people I encountered. It turned out this was a rich source to draw on when I returned to Australia in 2002. It was only then, from such a huge geographic distance, I was really able to start writing The Waiting Room, fictionalizing some of those experiences.
Rumpus: The threat of terror forms part of the backdrop of this story, and at times actual terrorism comes very much into the foreground. As a result of that and other things, the story has political implications. Yet it’s at the same time a deeply human story about individuals. Was it at all a struggle to write a novel that didn’t efface the humanity and individuality of its characters, when issues of terror and contentious Middle East politics were unavoidable?
Kaminsky: As a doctor I am reminded daily of our common humanity—when I see a patient I always try to see their personal narrative, rather than their politics or ideology. Nowadays we are constantly bombarded by images of war and terror in the media, so much so that there is always the risk of developing a certain level of compassion fatigue. I wanted to look behind these headlines at individuals who are trying to lead their day-to-day lives inside of a volatile reality. <>—that’s not what I’m trying to do—yet anything I write takes a political stance in a way. <
There are hundreds of other human stories that can be told in a place like Israel—but the story I wanted/needed to tell was Dina’s. At the same time, it was very important to me to portray cultural sensitivity. I set the actual waiting room in the novel inside an old building, from which the Arab owners fled in 1948 with the establishment of the State of Israel. I was conscious of not wanting to appropriate someone else’s narrative—it’s not my story to tell—but also felt a strong obligation to honor it, the broken tile representing the centrality of another culture.
waitingroom-pb-c
Rumpus: The Waiting Room places you solidly within the distinct and fascinating tradition of writer-physicians, which as you know includes illustrious and diverse names from Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams to Oliver Sacks and Paul Kalanithi. What unique insights do you think doctors bring to the conversation of literature? For you personally, what is the relationship between practicing medicine and writing? What are some of your favorite books by and/or about doctors?
Kaminsky: Dual careers go back as far as Apollo, who pulled off the gig of being a god of both poetry and medicine. I’ve always been a writer—in fact, my English grades helped get me into medical school. For me, the two professions feed each other, and I can’t imagine having just one. I believe the humanities can help make you a more compassionate doctor; good literature fosters empathy by bringing the reader into another person’s world. That’s what I try to do as a physician too, although our cohort never received much training outside of the biological model. Empathy and compassion are such an important skill. That’s why I became so excited when I discovered the canon of doctor-writers—I suddenly had a means for giving voice to my experiences over the years. I devoured the work of Oliver Sacks, who was so supportive to me as a young writer. Other physician-authors that I love are Abraham Verghese, Danielle Ofri, Sandeep Jauhar, Atul Gawande, and Miroslav Holub. All draw stories from their patients, but use them carefully and sensitively to reflect on their own practice, or as Jerome Groopman puts it so eloquently in the anthology Writer, M.D. I edited for Knopf: “to check their own emotional temperature.” In putting together this anthology of doctor-writers, I wanted to see what these writers shared; to explore what doctor-writers bring to the page that may be unique. A good doctor doesn’t just need to examine the body—it is also important to understand a patient’s narrative. Being a physician provides an enormous palette of material to reflect on in my writing, but more importantly, I hope that being a writer has somehow made me a more empathic doctor.
Rumpus: Dina, the protagonist, is the child of Holocaust survivors. Although the novel is set in Israel in the present day, the Holocaust has a significant presence in it. Can you talk about why the Holocaust had to form part of this novel?
Kaminsky: I didn’t set out to write a novel that dealt with the Holocaust—I was probably trying to avoid it, to be honest. It evolved thematically as the character of the mother’s ghost grew and demanded to be heard. My own mother was twenty-one when she emerged a sole survivor of Bergen-Belsen at the end of World War II. She died when I was in my early twenties and I decided early on I’d write a book about her life. Sadly, spilling out everything I knew only filled three pages of a notebook. I had been a reluctant listener as a teenager and I’m ashamed to admit that I couldn’t remember many of her stories—and there was no one left to ask. I spent my adult life trying to recapture what I had run from in my youth, in an attempt to piece together the strands of my mother’s narrative. I travelled to Poland, visiting her hometown of Lodz, trawled through archives at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and tried somehow to trace people in a handful of black and white photos she had brought with her from the DP Camp after the war. The Waiting Room takes these scraps and weaves them into a fictional “what if?”—a guess at what my mother’s story might have been.
Rumpus: The novel takes place over a single day, and placing it in the company of novels as monumental as Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses. Why did you decide to follow in that tradition, and what was the experience of writing in that way like? I also think one of the things that define this novel is the sense of convergence: at the time of the story, there is a heightened terror threat, Dina is pregnant, her marriage is faltering, she sees some especially challenging patients, and so forth. Why did it make sense, as a choice of craft, to have all these different things going on at once and within this span of time?
Kaminsky: Thanks for the comparison! During my MFA I was interested in exploring books that followed nonlinear narratives, for example, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, or Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness. One of the things survivors of war and terror describe is how any sense of time is distorted or suspended, and I wanted to see how I might evoke that feeling through the structure of my own book. I also felt that the language needed to be as tight as possible, to reflect Dina’s internal state of heightened anxiety and deep sense of dread. I was deeply influenced by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Anne Enright’s The Gathering. The Waiting Room took me ten years to write. Aside from time constraints due to a young family and demanding career, I wrestled with finding the right structure. At times I thought I might be writing two books, but intuitively it felt like it all belonged together. It was only after many drafts that I was able to see how all the loose threads were part of the same a patchwork quilt.
In parallel to the outward threat of a bomb being planted somewhere in her city, Dina’s own experiences come together in a single day. She was brought up to avoid war at all costs, so everything she has hitherto known as safe is suddenly challenged, and I have thrown everything at her simultaneously. In parallel to the real threat of an exterior explosion, she is on the verge of psychological implosion, swimming through layers of history—her mother’s as well as her own, which converge on this one moment in time. I felt there was something very powerful in the sense of the here-and-now being juxtaposed with the weight of history, and the haunting of ghosts imploring her to bear witness to the past. The trope of waiting is threaded throughout the novel to help build tension in the narrative.
Rumpus: Dina is an Australian whose vacation in Israel turned into a permanent life when she fell in love. Was it your intention to deal with themes such as dislocation and the experience of being a foreigner? Was there another reason you chose for Dina the history and identity you did?
Kaminsky: My parents were Jewish refugees who fled the shores of a blood-soaked Europe in search of the safety of distant shores. The largest number of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel came to Australia, to the southern city of Melbourne in particular. Despite my parents’ attempts to integrate into society and bring me up as a little Aussie girl, I spent my life feeling dislocated, unsure where I really belonged. As a Jewish kid in a Methodist school, I grew up with a sense of being an outsider. When I moved countries after getting married, that happened again—even though I felt a sense of home in many ways in Haifa, there was still a split between belonging and feeling somewhat marginalized. Immigration is a sort of mini-death—when you move you give up a part of yourself, as well as everything that is known, comfortable, and safe. Dina, my protagonist, has transposed herself from the seemingly safe sanctuary of a peaceful country and entered a war zone, at the same time crossing into the often fraught territory of immigration, marriage, and motherhood.
Stuart Waterman is a writer and publishing professional living in New York City. More from this author →
The Stories Doctors Tell: A Q&A with ‘Writer, MD,’ Editor Leah Kaminsky
By LEAH KAMINSKY
January 21, 2012
Image © Shutterstock
EDITOR'S NOTE:
Historically, doctors have expressed their unique viewpoints through literature. Writer, M.D., edited by Leah Kaminsky, celebrates this tradition with a collection of fiction and nonfiction by today’s most admired physician-writers. Kaminsky chatted with Signature and enlightened us about the inspiration for this extraordinary book.
Signature: What was the experience of editing like? Did you find it hard to select the right pieces for the collection?
BUY THE BOOK
Writer, M.D.
by Leah Kaminsky, editor
BARNES & NOBLE
INDIEBOUND
AMAZON
IBOOKS
Leah Kaminsky: I was like a kid in a candy shop. I made a wish list of all my favorite doctor-writers, people who had inspired me and whose work I had admired for many years, and within a week after asking them to contribute to the anthology they had all come on board, knowing that a percentage of proceeds would be donated to the Foundation for Sick Children. Then the hardest thing was choosing my all-time favorite pieces from each author’s body of work. I wanted the pieces to speak to each other too, in the same way that a bunch of doctors on a ward round discuss a patient’s condition. <> I hoped that placed together they might reveal some truth about the balance we need to maintain between scientific rationality and emotional truth.
SIG: Did any pieces in the collection strike you on a personal level? They’re all wonderful, but were any standout favorites?
LK: Each one moves me in a different way; I love them all. Fiction is my passion, and I still weep every time I reread Ethan Canin’s short story about loss, love, and ageing. Abraham Verghese’s brilliant essay on the lost art of physical examination, and how important that can be as an opportunity to develop trust between doctor and patient, is especially dear to my heart.
SIG: Why do you think there are so many doctors who are also drawn to writing fiction and essays?
LK: We are privileged as doctors to bear witness to the raw emotions of human beings at their most vulnerable, and also at their bravest. Some doctors use writing as a means of processing their experiences, in a therapeutic sense. Any creative outlet is important to provide balance. Not every doctor who picks up a violin is going to be a virtuoso, just as not everyone who picks up a pen will be a brilliant writer. I’m sure there are many plumbers who write too, but I guess doctors are exposed to a wealth of stories in their everyday lives. Caution must be taken regarding the ethics of using these narratives as material for writing. I think reading good literature and poetry is an important thing for a doctor to gain a deeper understanding of the human condition.
SIG: How do you think understanding a doctor’s experience helps the patients? Do you think the public is reluctant to see doctors as mere mortals?
LK: People seem intrigued to know what goes on behind the professional mask of a doctor. But it can be a two-edged sword — surprise, surprise — they <
Leah Kaminsky: THE WAITING ROOM
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Leah Kaminsky THE WAITING ROOM Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) 9.99 11, 15 ISBN: 978-0-06-249047-6
The daughter of Holocaust survivors contends with present-day violence in Israel and Palestine.When Dina wakes up one morning to radio warnings of a possible terrorist attack, she’s both worried and surprised: normally Haifa, her home, doesn’t see much violence. Dina is a doctor as well as the mother of a young boy, with a baby on the way. She’s afraid to let her son go off to school, but what else can she do? She kisses her son and husband goodbye and heads off to work. Kaminsky (Stitching Things Together, 2012, etc.) is also, like Dina, a doctor. She’s an evocative storyteller, and she’s sensitive to the intersections between physical and emotional pain and the way that memory intrudes upon daily reality. But <
Writer, M.D.: The Best Contemporary Fiction and Nonfiction by Doctors
Donna Chavez
Booklist. 108.8 (Dec. 15, 2011): p9.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Listen
Full Text:
* Writer, M.D.: The Best Contemporary Fiction and Nonfiction by Doctors.
Ed. by Leah Kaminsky.
Jan. 2012. 272p.Vintage, paper, $15 (9780307946867). 810.8.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Lucky the reader who picks up poet and physician Kaminsky's excellent anthology, chockablock with works by some of the finest medical writers around--Atul Gawande, Sandeep Jauhar, Oliver Sachs, and Danielle Ofri, to name a few. <
Chavez, Donna
Writer, M.D.: The Best Contemporary Fiction and Nonfiction by Doctors
Rachael Dreyer
Library Journal. 136.20 (Dec. 1, 2011): p123.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Writer, M.D.: The Best Contemporary Fiction and Nonfiction by Doctors. Vintage: Random. Jan. 2012. c.272p, ed. by Leah Kaminsky. ISBN 9780307946867. pap. $15. LIT
Physician and poet Kaminsky (Stitching Things Together) presents this new compilation of fiction and nonfiction from such literary and scientific icons as Abraham Verghese and Oliver Sacks, driving home the point that while our health-care system might be broken, our doctors are not. As patients, we can forget that doctors are fellow human beings, not automatons conducting surgeries. This compilation reminds us of this fact, revealing doctors' encounters with their own mortality and that of their patients. Nonfiction essays by Pauline Chen and Atul Gawande, among others, describe the ordeals of medical school, the exhausting stretch of internships and residencies, and the responsibilities, gratification, and adrenaline rush of working in pediatrics, the ICU, and the operating theater. Short fiction offerings by Ethan Canin, Jacinta Halloran, and others take us outside of the realm of medicine, reflecting on such themes as aging, canine medical test subjects, losing a child, acceptance, and forgiveness. VERDICT The physician writers who contributed to this collection of essays and stories provide a counterpoint to the often stark and disheartening realities of seeking medical treatment in America today. Recommended.--Rachael Dreyer, Univ. of Wyoming, Laramie
Dreyer, Rachael
The Waiting Room review: Leah Kaminsky and the migrant dilemma in Israel
Anne Susskind
SHARE
SHARE ON FACEBOOK
SHARE ON TWITTER
LINK
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-waiting-room-review-leah-kaminsky-and-the-migrant-dilemma-in-israel-20150930-gjy8ue.html
The Waiting Room by Leah Kaminsky.
The Waiting Room by Leah Kaminsky.
Fiction
The Waiting Room
LEAH KAMINSKY
Vintage, $32.99. Buy now on Booktopia
"Galutnik: A Diaspora Jew. To many Israelis, the word also means coward, an eternal victim as opposed to the strong sabra Jew born in Israel." It is this tension that runs through Leah Kaminsky's debut novel, about Dina from Melbourne who winds up living in the port city of Haifa after marrying Eitan. She's a doctor, they have a son Shlomi, and she's pregnant.
She is also the child of Holocaust survivors and her late mother had a "just-in-case" suitcase packed in case they had to flee. Her mother, who used to shop at the supermarket in Glenhuntly Road by day and trudge through the heavy snows of Bergen-Belsen by night, tells her that having children is "our best revenge against Hitler" and kept her ghosts muted by bottles of pills: blue for nerves, red for sleep and white to stop the tears.
Dina too has her suitcases in the Haifa flat, stacked atop the cupboard near her bed. She too carries baggage, "a heavy sack, filled with the dead, permanently hoisted over her shoulder". And while she stares at the carobs, pine trees and bulbul birds, part of her sees the Australian magpies and lorikeets in the wattle trees.
Very much a migrant experience, except most migrants seek out a better life and safety. She is in Haifa with a bomb scare and must shove aside her fears and drop her Shlomi at school and attend to patients, including the "bent twig" of the embittered elderly German Jewish Mrs Susskind with her discount vouchers and Filipina carer and New York banker son – a caricature perhaps, but with some basis in reality. From the day he was born, Dina has felt as if Shlomi was "swaddled in battle fatigues".
To outsiders, particularly Australians who she sees as "having polite, silent smiles" that "keep a grasp on any outburst", the kind of drama in Dina's head and the intemperance of her language may be alienating, as might the depiction of women such as Mrs Susskind.
But Dina herself is alienated. She fears a bomb blast, and knows the political situation is out of control, but in the same moment laughs at herself over a cheese Danish. She's ashamed of the killing of three Palestinians by border police, and feels desperately sorry for an Iranian patient who was sent a bill for bullets used to execute her husband at Tehran's Evin Prison.
She stares at an ultrasound wondering how to break the news of a "solid mass" to a woman awaiting the good news of a male heir. But then she panics when she spots an Arab worker at Shlomi's school with a bulging pocket and reports him. It turns out he is the kids' Toffee Man, and it is just an "arsenal of toffees".
Kaminsky's book is set in 2001, and things have only grown more polarised since then, and attitudes hardened. In that it paints a sympathetic picture of a compassionate Australian-Israeli haunted by ghosts of the Holocaust, some would condemn it as apologist. Others will find it confronting at other levels. <
The Next Generation
354
40
1
A sharp novel about the daughter of Holocaust survivors living in Israel.
By Ilana Masad
promo illo.
imon Roy
Holocaust literature emerged out of a need to tell the stories of trauma in all its complexity. Books about the generation that was birthed by Holocaust survivors are not as common. There’s Maus, by Art Spiegelman, and another comic, the recent Flying Couch by Amy Kurzweil. Sonia Pilcer’s The Holocaust Kid explores the terrain with short stories of a ’60s New York girl trying to keep her parents’ past in her present, while Second Hand Smoke by Thane Rosenbaum is a mystery with postmodern sensibilities and a card-shark heroine. Leah Kaminsky’s The Waiting Room, released in Australia in 2015 and now published in the U.S., adds to this small list; set in Israel, a country where survivors have been both looked down upon and revered, Kaminsky’s novel explores intergenerational trauma with approachable simplicity.
Dina, the protagonist of The Waiting Room, is a second-generation survivor from Australia living in Haifa, Israel’s most diverse city, during one of its most polarizing times, the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. But her heart isn’t in the conflict-ridden state; it is in Australia, where her parents’ bones are buried. Throughout the novel, Dina is beset with memories of her childhood in a Melbourne suburb where she grew up with “aunts” and “uncles” who were not related to her by blood but rather by history. Survivors of the Holocaust who emigrated to Australia from Europe, they were the backdrop of Dina’s early years and the only kind of extended family she had.
Advertisement
Some of those survivors, like Dina’s father, never spoke about their experiences in the camps. But for others, like Dina’s mother, the silence broke and became an obsessive rehashing of the terrors—much like the authors of Holocaust literature, the storytellers were trying to understand what they’d been through. Indeed, Dina’s mother, though dead, still tells the stories; her ghost emerges from the ether whenever her daughter least wants her around. The epitome of the Jewish mother, she kibitzes about old grievances and tells Dina off for being displeased with her lot, but most of all, she continues to tell stories from her time in Bergen-Belsen, endlessly repeating her own traumatic tales for the benefit of her very pregnant daughter.
The trauma of the past is very different from the trauma of the present in which The Waiting Room takes place. Dina is living in Israel of the early 2000s, when bomb scares and bombs feel like daily occurrences. Her husband Eitan is a strapping Israeli tsabar, a resident born and bred in Israel, and Dina owns her own medical practice in Haifa.
Get Slate in your inbox.
Most of the novel takes place during the morning and early afternoon of a single day when Haifa is put on bomb alert, the morning news warning residents to be especially vigilant—there is no explanation for how or why, but residents understand that the source of the information is Israeli intelligence. Dina spends the hours dreading the possible bomb—the location of which is unknown—despite knowing that alerts are common and often don’t lead to anything. She falls into reveries spurred on by her mother’s presence and loses sense of where she is. Her disappearance into memories is helpful for the reader, as it fills in useful backstory, but it’s also an apparent symptom of her second-generation trauma. (Dissociation, which seems to be what Dina experiences during these trips down memory lane, is a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder.)
Eitan dismisses Dina’s concerns, and their son is comfortable with the situation. As Eitan says, “There are hundreds of warnings every day in this country. The kids get used to it; life goes on.” Israeli children grow up being conditioned to think that they are in danger, surrounded by enemies (a common refrain referring to the countries bordering Israel on three sides).
Leah Kaminsky.
Leah Kaminsky.
Nicola Bernardi
Advertisement
Though the reality of second- (and third-) generation syndrome used to be oft-disputed, recent studies have found that trauma can be passed through generations and leave genetic evidence in offspring’s cells. Symptoms vary but can include anxiety, eating disorders, intense fear over the death of loved ones, and a need to overly care for them. It is primarily the last two of these that affect Dina—her fear for her son intertwines with her memories of taking care of her mother when she was a teenager. Dina’s haunting mother—as well as a couple of fantasies where she slips into her mother’s shoes at Bergen-Belsen—convey the most literal symptoms of PTSD.
Dina’s childhood was safe, unlike her son’s, and so even though the images of her mother’s depression are etched into her mind, the physical danger of living in a country where suicide bombers are commonplace is foreign to her. But she is far more Israeli than she thinks, even if she’s still considered an outsider by her husband. In one memorable scene, she rushes to her son’s school with the premonition that he is in danger; she becomes convinced that one Arab worker at the school, wearing a bulky jacket, is hiding a suicide bomb. Anyone who’s lived in Israel has seen a moment of casual xenophobia that turns quickly into panic and rage, or undergone one herself.
At the same time, Israelis are often quite aware of the realities of other foreigners who come into their country. When Dina is at the supermarket, she encounters a patient of hers, escorted by Jane, a Filipina who’s come to Israel to work as a caretaker for the elderly. “She has probably left her family behind in some poor village,” Dina thinks, “and come miles away from home to look after a garrulous old lady … on a salary of $500 a month.” Though Dina too served as a caretaker for her mother, she doesn’t see the similarities between her and Jane: both self-exiled from their homes, both working too hard, both putting on masks of patience so no one will see their real frustrations. The difference being, of course, that no matter how much Dina feels like an outsider, she is still in a much better condition that Jane and has the privilege to think of her as a poor soul worthy of pity.
Kaminsky uses plain language for these moments. Though the novel is primarily a portrayal of a woman still mourning her mother, <
Advertisement
In the end, The Waiting Room is not only Dina’s story but that of a second-generation diaspora who chose to move to Israel despite their parents eschewing that option after World War II. But Kaminsky is at her strongest when handling the relationship between Dina and her mother, who, while annoying, is also a font of Zen-like wisdom. “You kid yourself you have some sort of control over life,” Dina’s mother says, adding, “There’s freedom in futility.” The novel is an example of an uncontrollable day in Dina’s life, and her mother’s ghost is, in more ways than one, the reason Dina stays alive to see its end.
---
The Waiting Room by Leah Kaminsky. Harper Perennial.
The Waiting Room
Image of The Waiting Room: A Novel
Author(s):
Leah Kaminsky
Release Date:
November 14, 2016
Publisher/Imprint:
Harper Perennial
Pages:
304
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Saadia Faruqi
What happens to people who go through extreme trauma? What happens to their future generations as they grapple with parents and grandparents with indelible stains on their psyche? The survivors of war and genocide, whether Syria, Bosnia, or Bangladesh can all attest to painful answers to these questions. Kaminsky answers them through the stories of Israeli Jews.
Much has been written about the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, but most of it is in the form of historical fiction, or even nonfiction that deals with death as a clinical thing. Little is written from the current backdrop of Jews in Israel who struggle with a collective history full of trauma. In the recent political tussle, often deadly, between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the stories of their Jewish predecessors who fled Nazi Germany gets lost, at least from an international literary perspective.
The plight of Palestinians, who are undergoing their own trauma now, notwithstanding, those stories of earlier Jews deserve to be told as well. Kaminsky’s attempt in The Waiting Room is testament to that need.
The story revolves around Dina, the daughter of holocaust survivors, and her dead mother who is her constant companion as a ghost/confidant. If some readers balk at this strangeness, it is only during the initial pages, because the story pulls you in regardless. Dina is not the ordinary Israeli Jew in that she hates living in the Holy Land. She is Australian, only moving to Israel because of her husband’s intense love for that nation. She herself is a doctor, and much of the book takes place in and around her waiting room.
Dina is what many Jews would perhaps call a self-hating Jew. Her husband Eitan says in the beginning:
“You are such a galutnik.”
Galutnik: a Diaspora Jew. To many Israelis, the word also means coward, an eternal victim as opposed to the strong sabra Jew born in Israel.
Dina is scared even though she lives in Haifa, which is considered much safer than other Israeli cities. In her professional capacity she meets all sorts of people, including Arabs. There is passing reference to Muslim lives, like when Dina asks her husband in anger, “So how the hell would you know what Israeli women are feeling? Or Palestinian women, for that matter?”
But in the end, The Waiting Room is about Jewish lives, past, present and future. Dina is haunted—literally—by her mother’s ghost, who survived the Holocaust but lived the trauma of it for the rest of her life. Slowly, the story of the mother’s escape unfurls, including her own guilt at having abandoned her mother—Dina’s grandmother—at the train station to work for SS soldiers. Those who live have a burden to carry that those who die don’t, and that is the theme that runs most strongly across the entire novel.
“The dead were the lucky ones, you know.” Her mother smoothes a few strands of hair back from her forehead. “After we were liberated, there was silence for a while.”
Dina imagines a soft sighing seeping up from the earth, melting into the windless air. The murmuring of the dead. Their voices becoming a steady whisper that followed her mother everywhere.
Unsurprisingly for someone who lives in the past to such an extent, Dina’s complete fears of the future are an important part of the novel as well. How she worries for her son, who will have to enter Israel’s army when he becomes a certain age. How she wonders if every person on the street is a possible terrorist. Is this what trauma—even transferred trauma from parents—does to you? She gravitates toward others who have led miserable lives, such as her patient Tahirih, a Baha’i woman whose husband was killed in Iran. She is repelled by a Jewish neighbor who kills kittens and accuses Arabs of being “a bunch of murderers.” Readers get snippets of all these rich lives, and a tapestry of characters is born.
All of Dina’s fears come to pass as a terrorist attacks Haifa, and she is one of those injured. Readers knew that was coming from the first pages, yet the feelings, sights, and sounds as we see the world through Dina’s eyes make it no less startling when it happens. Intermingled with the account of the attack are stories of the Holocaust: raw accounts of death and horror and hopelessness. When Dina shouts a protest, it is as if she is saying what we all think, as readers and as human beings:
“Enough! Enough! Dina wants to shout. “All these stories of horror and blood and tragedy. I’m sick of hearing about them. Bad lot, the Nazis, yeah, we all know that, but it’s over and I have a life to live now. So just shut up. I don’t want to know.”
Yet <
Saadia Faruqi is Pakistani American author of the short story collection Brick Walls: Tales of Hope and Courage from Pakistan. Her writing has appeared in such venues as Huffington Post and The Islamic Monthly. She is also an interfaith activist and speaker.
LEAH KAMINSKY The Waiting Room. Reviewed by Tracy Sorensen
Tags: Australian women writers/ Leah Kaminsky
waitingroomThis debut novel of traumas past and present is both compelling and surprising.
Leah Kaminsky’s The Waiting Room starts with a heavily pregnant woman picking through shattered bodies in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. In the mess there are the unseeing eyes of the dead and a tiny item from a toybox, rendered grotesque by its new setting: the removable eye of a Mr Potato Head doll.
This is a novel about life and death in extremis. It’s <
The action takes place in Haifa, Israel, over the course of a day in which the city is on high alert over a potential terrorist attack. Dina, born and raised in Melbourne, and now a general practitioner in a shabby clinic, is pummelled by rising fear and haunted by the ghost of her mother, her ‘eternal albatross of a mother’. Her unborn baby, meanwhile, is kicking away at her. Dina is often staggering, lightheaded, bumping into things.
Dina’s eternal albatross is long dead but ever-present. She is seen at the end of the hall, peering around the shower curtain, in the back seat of the car. She provides a running commentary on Dina’s cooking and her relationship with her husband and tells stories of Poland before the war and stories of atrocities in the Bergen-Belsen camp. Even before her own encounter with a terrorist attack, Dina’s life is lived as <>
Escaping to the bathroom between patients, Dina returns to ‘another place in time, where she also belongs’:
She lifts the body off the table and drapes it around her like a coat, dead hands clamping onto her life, searing into her skin. In the mirror she can see it is her mother fixed to her back.
We’re in for an intense ride, we know that, but <
And then, of course, there’s the politics of the Holy Land itself. Kaminsky notes that in Arabic and Hebrew, people bid each other peace all day – salaam, shalom – and yet this is the very thing that is wanting. This is a war zone, and Dina is entirely inside her side of it. We see the world only through her eyes, through the prism of the stories that made her. We are told that Dina’s general practice is housed in an old Arabic building from which its owners ‘fled and never returned‘. Who were those people? What is the world like through their eyes? We don’t know. This is not their story.
And yet this intensity, this ferociously personal view, is part of the point. The world of the novel is a world in which the worst possible things have already happened and will certainly happen again. We’re watching what happens to one human being in that crucible. Dina has her own particular hauntings that we may not share, but we are all, one way or another, haunted. In this, Kaminsky is our Virgil, guiding us – sometimes playfully – through the circles of hell.
It may be intense, but we are entertained along the way. The novel is full of vivid and sometimes hilarious encounters between richly observed characters, each with their own driving life force. Mrs Susskind is virulently racist, has a suppurating sore on her leg and drowns male kittens in a bucket. The hypochondriac Evgeni, a Russian engineer now eking out a living as a street sweeper, is a complete pest. The Jewish ladies waiting to be chosen by the best carp in the barrel are delightful. Here is humanity, in all its minutiae, in all its terrifying grandness, banality and brutality.
Meanwhile, the immediate situation is utterly compelling. You know the day is going to end badly but you don’t how or when or where or for whom. You’re driven forward, to find out.
Leah Kaminsky The Waiting Room Vintage 2015 304pp PB $32.99
Tracy Sorensen is a writer and filmmaker. She lived in Newtown in the 1990s but is now in Bathurst, where the landscape was over-cleared a long time ago and consequently there are not enough birds for a decent dawn chorus. You can visit her website here.
You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
Writer, M.D.: The Best Contemporary Fiction and Nonfiction by Doctors by Leah Kaminsky Amazon.com order for
Writer, M.D.
by Leah Kaminsky
Order: USA Can
Vintage, 2012 (2012)
Softcover, e-Book
Read an Excerpt
* * Reviewed by Rheta Van Winkle
Writer, M.D. is a collection of short fiction and nonfiction, all of which was written by doctors. I believe the best-known of them all would be Oliver Sacks, who wrote Awakenings, which later inspired a play by Harold Pinter and an Oscar-nominated feature film. There are ten nonfiction stories, making up about two-thirds of the book and six stories that are fictional. <>, rather than the patient's. Several of the stories are written by surgeons and address the difficulty that people have learning how to cut into another person's body.
Resurrectionist is a long story about the difficulty of cutting that is written by a pediatrician. It's about what it is like to have to dissect a human body in medical school. Pauline Chen may go into more detail than she needs to. A squeamish person would probably have some difficulty reading it. In fact, she mentions that some medical students dropped out of medical school during the period of time when they had to do dissections. This story answered some questions for me, though, as I have wondered how on earth doctors, who seem to delight in explaining in great detail what is wrong with you, learn so much about the human body. After all that time taking a body apart and memorizing each muscle, tendon, and bone, I suspect that remembering all of those terms would be easy.
Bedside Manners discusses the new way in which doctors use tests for diagnosis compared to the old way (which this doctor learned) of examining the patient and listening to the patient describe their symptoms. This physician thinks that doctors rely too much on testing these days, and that all of those MRI's, CT scans or X-rays are being requested too frequently and unnecessarily.
The short fiction was varied in tone, from dark to sad to funny, in a quirky sort of way, in the short story The Duty to Die Cheaply. It tells about a doctor who is called on to take care of a patient aboard an airliner. He is reluctant to answer the page, with good reason, as it turns out. The last story, Communion, is told from the viewpoint of a young girl whose father is dying, and whose bossy aunt has taken over the household while she takes care of him. I really liked this tender account of a child losing a parent.
Most of the stories in this book, both fictional and nonfictional, were interesting to read. Although they might be enjoyed more by people in the medical profession, there were few technical terms. I enjoyed Writer, M.D. and think the book provides a nice bridge between doctors and patients.
Book Review: Writer, M.D.: The Best Contemporary Fiction and Nonfiction by Doctors, Edited by Leah Kaminsky
Posted by: Rhetta Akamatsu November 9, 2011 in Book Reviews, Books Comments Off on Book Review: Writer, M.D.: The Best Contemporary Fiction and Nonfiction by Doctors, Edited by Leah Kaminsky
Please Share...000000
WRiter, M.D.With Writer, M.D. Leah Kaminsky wants to give the reader a glimpse into the very souls of physicians, by using non-fiction and fiction written by doctors themselves. It is an interesting idea.
However, <
Certainly, it is interesting to know how various types of doctors deal with mortality and loss, but there needs to be balance. Doctors also save lives and cure people, and even bring new life into the world, but you would not know it from this book. Perhaps if there was something in the title which warned one, that would be better, but the subtitle only says “The Best Contemporary Fiction and Non-Fiction by Doctors.” I doubt this is strictly true, because I am sure there are doctors out there who are writing interesting work about patients who live and recover.
There are a few pieces in Writer, M.D. which, while still dealing with grievous loss, do so in such a way that they still are enjoyable to read. Oliver Sacks’ “The Lost Mariner” stands out in the non-fiction and is a fascinating story of a man who has no short-term memory and believes he is living in 1945, but the story is from 1985, and therefore dated and hardly contemporary.
The fiction is somewhat more interesting than the non-fiction. “Dog 1, Dog 2” is an intriguing story of a researcher who identifies a bit too much with his subjects, for instance, and John Murray’s story, “Communion,” is my favorite work in the book, because it captures a time and place in history so vividly.
Overall, however, Writer, M.D. (available January 10, 2012), <
The answer I got from this book to the question posed in the book, which is how do doctors deal with traumatic situations on a daily basis, is “Not very well.”
We're All Going to Die review: Leah Kaminsky puts a positive spin on our demise
Margaret Rice
LIVING
We're All Going To Die: A Joyful Book about Death
DR LEAH KAMINSKY
HARPERCOLLINS, $27.99
"We're all going to die." It's no surprise, but it's the title of this book by Australian award-winning author and medical doctor Leah Kaminsky. A stamp on the cover, nestled among butterflies, tells us it is "A joyful book about death". We need that reassurance, since as palliative care specialists will tell you, a title such as this usually scares readers away.
SHARE
SHARE ON FACEBOOK SHARE
SHARE ON TWITTER TWEET
LINK
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/were-all-going-to-die-review-leah-kaminsky-puts-a-positive-spin-on-our-demise-20160721-gqav07.html
Doctor and author Leah Kaminsky.
Doctor and author Leah Kaminsky.
Kaminsky's purpose is a valuable one – to help break down Western culture's death fear. Paradoxically, despite living much longer than any other group of people who have walked this earth, we are also the most afraid of death. <
Kaminsky has impressive credentials in bringing together the worlds of medicine and writing. Her way into this book is to explain her life-long fear of death. She talks endearingly about people she has met through her medical practice and while at medical school. The book is partly biography, as well as interviews and an accessible review of the psychology behind how our society interacts with death.
SHARE
SHARE ON FACEBOOK
SHARE ON TWITTER
LINK
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/were-all-going-to-die-review-leah-kaminsky-puts-a-positive-spin-on-our-demise-20160721-gqav07.html
We're All Going to Die by Dr Leah Kaminsky.
We're All Going to Die by Dr Leah Kaminsky.
Each chapter addresses a new angle on what drives our fear. In chapter one, "Tunnel Vision of the Soul", she explains why ignoring death is ignoring life. She builds on her theme eloquently. In chapter eight, "On Dying Once", she talks about visiting Ray, who refused to discuss how close he was to death but cared for a menagerie of animals in his backyard: "Ray achieved life-affirming happiness by caring for the creatures he loved and was responsible for. Even the brief nature of their little lives offered him a healthier perspective on mortality, and that seems to have been the key for him to lead a fruitful life."
This contrasts with the story of Melanie, who thought she could chase away her fear of mortality with repeated plastic surgeries. They were no help at all when she was diagnosed with a potentially fatal brain tumour at the age of 63.
Kaminsky too briefly tells the poignant story of her mother's death. Maybe she has written about this before but it almost seemed hidden. I won't give the details, since it would be a spoiler but I was left wanting much more. Perhaps the dilemma for Kaminsky was that this might make the book too solemn.
She colours the book with a range of characters who work immersed in death: Amy Porter, a young Sydney mortician; Jenny Hayes, who manages students' cadaver dissections at Melbourne University, and Joanna Ebenstein, curator at New York's Morbid Anatomy Museum.
I liked Kaminsky more than these characters. We shouldn't be afraid to inspect death, be with its decay and loss, to nestle in close. I can see how fascinating these characters can be. But aren't people most likely to reach for a book on death when dealing with the pain of another's death? At these those moments wouldn't they rather be soothed, than amused?
That feeds into the conundrum that led to this book in the first place: we need to talk about the subject of death more but how do we do it in a way that brings the reader in?
Kaminsky's book is another to remind us of psychotherapist Irvin Yalom's idea, which she quotes: "The more you fail to experience your life fully, the more you will fear death." And another to chip away at the fear.
Leah Kaminsky is a guest at Melbourne Writers Festival. mwf.com.au
Posted on 2 Aug, 2016 in Non-Fiction | 0 comments
LEAH KAMINSKY We’re all going to die: A joyful book about death. Reviewed by Tracy Sorensen
Tags: Australian women's writing/ Leah Kaminsky
wereallgoingtodieLeah Kaminsky invites us to ask questions about our own attitudes and behaviours in the face of death, with the promise of a more fully lived life.
To be a doctor terrified of death, writes Kaminsky, is like being a pizza chef terrified of dough. This is the problem at the heart of this charming and thought-provoking book – we’re all going to die.
For the author, a Melbourne GP and writer, death is never far away. It’s there in the cancer diagnosis of a young family man, in the nonagenarian on a regular check-up, in the hospitalised woman struggling to take her last breaths.
And yet, for all that death is part of her routine, Kaminsky has – until now – been scared stiff of it. She has parlayed her fear into busyness, into a preoccupation with the ‘life’side of medicine’s life-and-death ledger. Death is a ‘freefall into a black hole of terror’. Who wants that?
The trigger for a new approach is the impressive response of one of her patients. Michael is a 37-year old husband and father of young children and it is Kaminsky’s job to give him the news about his inoperable pancreatic cancer. She is full of dread, but Michael grasps the nettle. Refusing to participate in pointless and evasive ‘let’s conquer cancer’ conversations, he decides not to waste time on ‘bullshit’. Instead, he will throw a death party. All his friends – and his doctor – are invited:
Michael showed me what could be possible – the depth of love he expressed for others, the openness of conversation, the immediacy of the moment right here, right now – what the paradigm might be if we weren’t so afraid of death.
Inspired by Michael, Leah Kaminsky decides to confront her own fear of death head-on, partly by writing this book. She explores her own feelings and habits, weaving them through her exploration of our society’s strange dance with death: on the one hand endlessly playing and replaying it in computer games and movies, and on the other hand constantly surprised by it, behaving as if it were some sort of cruel and peculiar misfortune.
The silence and awkwardness surrounding death has important consequences. It means we risk <
It’s all difficult stuff, but this eclectic tour of the territory is not without humour and even – as boldly promised on the cover – a good dose of joy.
We learn that Japanese culture venerates the honorable suicide – this is the land of the samurai tradition of hara-kiri – and that a popular tourist attraction is Suicide Forest. We hear of moth phobias and sword-swallowers, of a species of jellyfish that ages backwards, of the weird delights of Brooklyn’s Morbid Anatomy Museum. Such tidbits may not be joyful, exactly, but they’re certainly Quite Interesting in the Stephen Fry sense. They loosen us up, get us walking around more confidently and purposefully in the company of death.
But then, just as we’re getting comfy, we’re jolted out of the general and cultural into the painfully personal and specific. We learn that Kaminsky’s mother, a holocaust survivor, eventually committed suicide when her daughter was in her early 20s. And there was a boyfriend before her own long current marriage: a young man ‘riddled with tumours’ at the ripe old age of 32. The gears have suddenly shifted; perhaps we are about to descend into the underworld.
But we do not. This is not the book for all that; perhaps we will get those darker, more searing stories another time. Or perhaps this is the source of the energy that drove Kaminsky’s powerful novel, The Waiting Room.
Instead of descending into the circles of hell, we stay in a more workaday world, meeting some of Kaminsky’s patients, listening in to their conversations. Ray, for example. Kaminsky visits Ray at home and clips his toenails. Ray’s light is fading but he remains fiercely committed to his animals, including a lamb he feeds from a Foster’s Lager bottle filled with milk, a couple of tabby cats and a genial duck. He lovingly tends the miniature pet cemetery down at the back of his yard.
He carved the name of each animal he had cared for into miniature gravestones and visited each one every day. Ray wasn’t so much avoiding death as surrounding himself with life.
And <
Being ‘haunted’, one of our species’s most primal fears and the source of some of our darkest myths, can just as easily be the source of our most comforting memories.
This book is an exploration, not a how-to manual. And yet it invites us to ask questions about our own attitudes and behaviours in the face of death. In that engagement lies the promise of a more fully lived life.
Leah Kaminsky We’re All Going to Die: A joyful book about death HarperCollins 2016 PB 304pp $27.99
Tracy Sorensen is definitely going to die. In the meantime she is teaching journalism at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst.
You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
John Funder reviews 'We’re all going to die' by Leah Kaminsky
font sizedecrease font sizeincrease font sizePrintEmailCommentJOHN FUNDERPublished in March 2017, no. 389
John Funder reviews 'We’re all going to die' by Leah Kaminsky
WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE
by Leah Kaminsky
HarperCollins $27.99 pb, 293 pp, 9781460749999
John Funder
John Funder
John Funder is a Melbourne physician. Kathleen Funder, mother of their children Anna, Hugh and Joshua, died of cancer in 1998.
By this contributor
Mystic blood
Related articles
Johanna Leggatt reviews 'Depends What You Mean By Extremist: Going rogue with Australian deplorables' by John Safran
Paul Morgan reviews 'Peak: Reinventing middle age' by Patricia Edgar and Don Edgar
Deborah Zion reviews 'Time to Die' by Rodney Syme
Mark McKenna reviews 'Illicit Love: Interracial sex and marriage in the United States and Australia' by Ann McGrath
Good general practice is the cornerstone of a good healthcare system: Australia is blessed with both. Leah Kaminsky has been a Melbourne general practitioner for three decades and by her own explicit admission wrote We’re All Going to Die as a way to address her own fear of death. Her beloved mother was ‘the only leaf left dangling from her charred family tree, having survived the horrors of Bergen-Belsen’. She emigrated to Australia with a single suitcase and a butterfly marcasite brooch, now worn by Kaminsky in remembrance. Kaminsky’s parents met in Melbourne, worked hard, made do, like many in the Jewish community. They wanted Kaminsky to become a lawyer, where her capacity of empathy may have been stifled, wasted. Fortunately, she chose to do medicine. Thousands of patients in Melbourne have every reason to applaud her choice.
The book’s front cover, among the butterflies, bears a quote from the New York Times by Mary Roach, best-selling author of the unfortunately titled Stiff (2003): ‘A beautiful, brave, inspiring work. Required reading for anyone who plans to die.’ This is routine gush: the book is engaging but by no stretch of the imagination beautiful, the eye of the beholder notwithstanding. It is brave, in that the author examines her own fears and responses, openly, frankly, and self-critically. Inspiring no, but a very useful book for ‘anyone who plans to die’, and who might need help for a besetting fear of death, as shared by the author.
We’re All Going to Die - Book Review
Written by Robin Osborne
Published: 26 July 2016
Book Reviews
We’re All Going to Die - Dr Leah Kaminsky (HarperCollins 293 pp)
A Long Time Coming - Melanie Joosten (Scribe 232 pp)
Reviewed by Robin Osborne
Mirroring the demographics of our society, books about ageing, end-of-life-care and death have become increasingly frequent and these works from two well-regarded Australian authors are valuable additions to the burgeoning field.*
Both are <
While commenting on covers may be superficial, I would note the coincidence of both depicting butterflies - do they signify old age, and if so, how? - although in the case of the Kaminsky book an heirloom butterfly brooch makes an appearance.
Dr Kaminsky, a GP, observes that, “During thirty years of practice you get to see a wide range of ailments, a veritable litany of woes. Always at the back of my mind has been a rumbling sense of dread, loosely disguised by a morbid curiosity to know where and when I am going to die.
“Which disease number will come up? Until now, it’s all been a bit of a crapshoot trying to predict, and hence prevent, whatever disease might have my name written on it.”
While contemplating her own mortality, she recognises that while “we all have to die one day… if we strive to surround ourselves with life and meaning, we only have to die once.”
In the meantime, then, we should seek the best life possible, a philosophy highlighted by the story of 90-year-old Julia, a patient with a multiplicity of conditions who seeks medical approval to contest a 50-metre swim in the over-75s class at the Senior Olympics.
Fearing an adverse outcome, Kaminsky hesitates, but after a checkup gives the go-ahead.
“Maybe I was worried that her family might sue me if something went wrong, or perhaps I was simply being ageist.”
Some time later, Julia returns, proudly waving a gold medal from the event. As it turned out, she was the only one in the race.
Kaminsky cites psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl who said we can only make peace with our mortality by finding meaning in our own lives.
As the author puts it, “Rather than dreaming of having better sex, bungee jumping off a cliff or meeting Elton John, living a life in which we are true to ourselves is far more rewarding than merely walking along the treadmill of existence.”
Focus subjects include end-of-life directives, the pathological fear of childbirth, and the importance of those working with the dead, truly “the oldest profession in the world.”
The long road to death in various social and cultural contexts is the focus of the eight ‘essays on old age’ by Melanie Joosten whose acclaimed novel Berlin Syndrome is now being made as a film.
With a masters in social work, she is accustomed to meeting older people, and focused her interviews for this book more on the present and future than the past, discovering that “a failure of our bodies and their constituent parts is only the most obvious facet of getting older.”
Less obvious but more concerning, she writes, is how society “orchestrates our gradual exit from public life as we age, recasting us from lead players with individual agency to burdensome detritus.”
This book also pulls no punches, making it another valuable contribution to the debate we need to have.
She continues, “Too often the only public conversation about ageing revolves around the question of euthanasia, discounting the possibility that as we as a society figure out how to live our later lives with dignity, perhaps we are in no position to jump to conclusions about how to end our lives with dignity.”
Addressing the current ‘positive-ageing agenda’, Joosten worries about the expectation that all older people should be fit and healthy, and positively engaged with life, with an inability to do so being often framed as a personal failure - not all nonagenarians can swim competitively!
This pressure, bolstered by superannuation ads and health promotion materials, ignores not only wider systemic causes but the fact that some things, such as the inevitability of death, cannot be treated or cured.
Yet this agenda “posits that a person’s best self is their young self - before the onset of any age-related concerns - and sees old age as a corruption of the natural way of things rather than a continuation.”
Equally concerning is that with almost two-thirds of over-85s being female, does the treatment of older people as “second-class citizens” result from their being mainly women?
Many questions are raised in this thoughtful work by a writer whose social work commitment arose from “a feeling of obligation towards those who do not have the opportunities I have had.”
The answers may be obvious but are proving hard to achieve: we need better end-of-life dignity, ideally at home, and a greatly enhanced aged-care and services environment, which she dubs “the biggest challenge of our ageing population”.
Mirroring Kaminsky, Joosten emphasizes the importance of living the most meaningful life while this is still possible.
“How we feel about leaving this world is influenced by how we live in this world - even as we are dying… we must properly consider the needs of our ageing population both as individuals and as a cohort, to discourage the presumption of burden and to embrace the ever-changing nature of a long life.”
Both books are valuable contributions to this ongoing discussion.
*The same trend is apparent in other developed countries, with one forthcoming title of note being Aging Wisely by contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum and Harvard law colleague Saul Levmore.
According to The New Yorker the pair investigates the ‘unknown country’ of old age, examining the moral, legal, and economic dilemmas: “The book is structured as a dialogue between two aging scholars, analyzing the way that old age affects love, friendship, inequality, and the ability to cede control.
“They both reject the idea that getting old is a form of renunciation.
“Nussbaum critiques the tendency in literature to “assign a ‘comeuppance’ ” to aging women who fail to display proper levels of resignation and shame. She calls for an “informal social movement akin to the feminist Our Bodies movement: a movement against self-disgust” for the aging.
“She promotes Walt Whitman’s “anti-disgust” world view, his celebration of the “lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean. . . . The thin red jellies within you or within me. . . . O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul.”
Death, dying and euthanasia: the taboos tackled by doctor Leah Kaminsky
Doctor and author Leah Kaminsky focuses on different aspects of our relationship with dying.
ANDREW MCMILLEN
The Australian12:00AM June 18, 2016
Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter
Share on email
Share more...
2
Death anxiety is a distinctly human trait, for our species alone is aware of mortality and the finite nature of lives. This fact is reflected in popular culture: consider the bucket list, a set of objectives terminally ill individuals attempt to fulfil when they know their time on this planet is limited, as if that wasn’t always the case from the moment they were born.
You are aware of this, too, even if your impending death is not on your mind every waking moment. Your ultimate deadline is growing nearer with each passing second, as your eyes pass across these words, having chosen to invest a few precious minutes in reading a newspaper review of a book about the last thing each of us will ever do.
As a family doctor, Leah Kaminsky has heard many of her patients’ bucket lists. For her, writing this wonderful and thoughtful book was a step towards staring down her own death anxiety. “I hoped that by putting pen to paper I would arrive at some sort of comfort zone, free from fear, having peeled off a protective skin layered with the debris of the past, of the ghosts I carry, of the many patients I have cared for, laughed with and fought for over the years,” she writes.
With We’re All Going to Die, Kaminsky establishes herself alongside Karen Hitchcock, another popular Australian doctor-writer who has managed to bridge the gap between the medical profession and laypeople by putting into words her experiences of caring for the rest of us. It is important work, for we rely on people such as Kaminsky and Hitchcock when things go wrong with our bodies and our minds, and it is to our benefit that both women are skilled and empathetic writers, too.
This book is split into a dozen chapters that focus on different aspects of our relationship with dying, such as <
Her first brush with it was when an uncle died just after Kaminsky had turned 13. She wonders whether this spurred her toward a career in medicine. The ghost of her mother sits permanently in the corner of her office, “chain-smoking and telling me I should have been a lawyer”. Halfway through the book, the author reveals that her depression-prone mother overdosed on medication, choosing to end her life after her children had become young adults and left the nest.
The scars of this act have run deep through Kaminsky’s life. “It has taken me thirty years to let these words spill out on to the blank page, calling her suicide a choice, reframing her farewell as an act of defiance, a final rude finger held up to Death.” Though the topics of euthanasia and assisted dying are at last moving from the fringes of taboo towards the centre of the national conversation, words such as these are still challenging and confronting to read.
This chapter on living with loss is one of the book’s longest and most affecting, paired as it is with the notion of ‘‘transition objects’’ such as her daughter’s plush toy rabbit, Bun. Kaminsky’s daughter is now a young woman, but “Sometimes when she’s out, I tiptoe into her room and hold Bun close to my heart, breathing in his faded smell as I greedily try to recapture the past.”
The author, who published her debut novel, The Waiting Room, last year, <
The challenge with a book such as We’re All Going to Die is how to draw together all of these loose, interrelated threads into a neat conclusion — or at least as neat a conclusion as can be fashioned from such a messy, emotional and difficult subject. Having put pen to paper in an attempt to stare down her death anxiety, Kaminsky’s decision on where to remove the pen from the page is a suitably <
Andrew McMillen is a Brisbane-based author and freelance journalist. His second book, Skeleton School: Dissecting the Gift of Body Donation, will be published in September.
We’re All Going to Die
By Leah Kaminsky
HarperCollins, 294pp, $27.99
Cracking the Code review: The taut tale of parents battling to save their son
Dianne Dempsey
SHARE
SHARE ON FACEBOOK
SHARE ON TWITTER
LINK
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/cracking-the-code-review-the-taut-tale-of-parents-battling-to-save-their-son-20150501-1mu9tc.html
Cracking the Code by Stephen and Sally Damiani.
Cracking the Code by Stephen and Sally Damiani.
Memoir
Cracking the Code
Stephen and Sally Damiani, with Leah Kaminsky
VIntage, $34.99
Stephen Damiani's persona burns through this story as an intelligent, highly focused fanatic. How else do you save your boy who has been diagnosed with a rare brain disorder, so rare it has no name? All you are told is that the myelin – the insulation that surrounds the nerves of the brain – is missing or breaking down. For little Massimo this meant the signals from the brain weren't travelling down the nerve pathways. Six years ago, when he was 12 months old, Massimo's developmental milestones stopped and he was regressing. He could not stand or speak. Stephen and his wife Sally were losing their son; and his prognosis was dire.
The neurologists' initially diagnosed a form of Leukodystrophy - a blanket term covering a group of rare inherited or genetic disorders. But in 2009 it was impossible to find the exact genetic cause. Stephen has a background in construction economics and risk management, he is not a scientist but he hit the internet like a man possessed and taught himself genomics.
He joined forces with neurologists across the globe, including Queensland scientist Ryan Taft, in order to analyse the genomes or DNA blueprints of not only Massimo but himself and his wife. In effect, they used genome sequencing in order to find a single genetic variation.
They finally hit the jackpot: Massimo has a previously unclassified condition now known as HBSL caused by a mutation in the DARS gene. Stephen and Sally now hope to halt the progress of Massimo's condition. Furthermore, Taft and Damiani have developed a tool with the potential to diagnose and treat diseases as widespread as diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
The writing of Cracking the Code is attributed to the Damianis "with" Dr Leah Kaminsky, but she is the one who pulled this complicated tale together. As the family's GP, she was the conduit to specialists and treatments and an unfailing source of support.
Kaminsky seamlessly inserts Stephen and Sally's voices, allowing them to express the impact of their ordeal in their own words. She also emphasises that it was the Damianis' strength and determination that heralded this international breakthrough in medical science.
A glossary would help the layperson, but overall, Cracking the Code is taut and fascinating.
Book: Cracking the Code
A father's love for an ailing child leads to medical progress. By Bill Condie.
SHARE
TWEET
NON FICTION
Cracking the Code
By Stephen and Sally Damiani with Leah Kaminsky
Vintage Australia (2015)
Before Massimo Damiani’s first birthday, the baby lost the ability to crawl. He could no longer pull himself to his feet and would topple over even when sitting on the floor to play. Before that he had hit every developmental milestone, but now something was going badly wrong.
Massimo had been born with an anomaly in his spinal cord and only one kidney, but doctors couldn’t put their finger on the cause of this new condition. All they could say was that it was a previously unknown form of leukodystrophy – the loss of myelin, the electrical insulation around neurons. His nervous system was crumbling and the prognosis was bleak.
But Massimo’s father Stephen was not about to let the story end there. With no background in medical science, he teamed up with geneticist Ryan Taft to map the family’s genome in an attempt to discover what was causing his son’s regression. It seemed an impossible task. At Stephen’s suggestion Ryan began to align the genomes of himself, his wife Sally as well as Massimo, to find any variations. Stephen never gave up. He designed the plan for the unconventional search. His lack of a medical background helped him to think outside the box. And fortunately, in Taft he had a willing accomplice.
Once Taft isolated the specific genetic mutation of the DARS gene that was causing Massimo’s illness, they then found other children with the same mutation to confirm the diagnosis. The next stage was to find a cure – it has not yet been found but Massimo is engaging with the world more and more.
In the course of investigating little Massimo’s case, the Damianis, Taft and other flexibly minded doctors have pioneered new procedures for tracking down the cause of previously baffling diseases.
Co-writer Leah Kaminsky, herself a doctor as well as an award-winning author, has done a wonderful job in telling this story. The narrative drives forward, the complex medical issues are well-explained, and the love and determination of Massimo’s family shines through. The book has been optioned as a film with script development already under way.
This article appeared in Cosmos 63 - Jun-Jul 2015 under the headline "Review: Cracking the Code"