Book Review: Make it Concrete (Israel; Holocaust author; a dog, too)

Make it Concrete, by Miryam Sivan (Cuidono Press, 2019, 221 pages, $16)

What’s It All About?

If a book can be about the whole world, about all of life (even yours), Make It Concrete is that book. A sweet book, set in Israel, about everything: about affairs (and some X-rated paragraphs), about children, about love and divorce, about dogs, about fear and escape, about one’s mother and about being a mother oneself, about having a child in the Army and not being able to reach her during a firefight, about not ever fitting in when one lives in a different county, and, finally, about having a different native language from both your mother and your daughter.

And it is also about a JRT named Woody and his relationships with the human members of his family and how they feel when they cannot find him. How he appears throughout the book as a constant that can bring the family together.

And Isabel's daughter was a K9 handler in the Army (in Israel, everyone serves in the Army - another roadblock in the road of Isabel really understanding her children and adopted country - she married and started a family as soon as she relocated to Israel, thus becoming exempt from military service and that way of life and memories).

And What About Concrete?

And concrete itself, housebuilding and the structural components of both a house and of life, plays a major part in the story, both in settings and in one major character.

And What About The Story?

Isabel Toledo is an expatriate living in Israel, a ghost-writer who pens the stories of Holocaust survivors into books for decades and whose mother is one such survivor who has never spoken of her experience. Why not? The question haunts Toledo.

Toledo is also descended from Spanish Jews so the reader is exposed to that side of history (but can gloss over it).

The Writing Itself

Author Miryam Sivan writes melodically, like a sonnet or an epic. Concrete is a long book that gets shorter the further into it you read. It finally ties all the loose ends in the end but perhaps too quickly for the majority of the book is slow and a story to savor because it is about everything. Like the life we live, we learn all about Isabel’s life – her dog, her children, her best friend, her parents whom she calls by their first names (to add to the voluminous cast of characters).

There was much research put into Concrete – from Israeli names (many) to Spanish history to Czech culture to Jewish traditions.

Vacillations

Our protagonist vacillates between being a good author of others’ stories but at a price that may be too high for too long, between one man in her life and another and also believing she needs to be alone, about wanting to ask her mother about how she survived the Holocaust yet not being able to do so.

Isn’t that what even our life is all about – vacillations? And decisions that we make or are made for us.

(As a former expat myself, I could empathize with the author’s feelings of being lost even in her family and, as a veteran, I can now better understand my mother’s concerns for my survival [our protagonist’s concern verges on panic]).