Rating: 3.5

Montreal-based Donna Nebenzahl, a now-retired Canadian journalist, brings the skills of her trade to this family history and autobiographical work which focuses on her 1950s childhood in what was then known as British Guiana. Nebenzahl’s first ten years were unusual ones. Born in Trinidad, she was brought, when only a few months old, to Georgetown, British Guiana by her young mother, Gwen, newly widowed and pregnant with Donna’s brother, George. The children’s 25-year-old father had recently died suddenly in Trinidad.

When Donna was three, Gwen departed for Canada to begin a new life there, leaving Donna and George in the care of her well-to-do Portuguese-Catholic parents and her large extended family. For the next seven years, the children lived in Georgetown, enveloped in the warm friendship of many aunts, uncles, and cousins. They also benefited from the kindness of the family’s servants and employees—descendants of African slaves and East-Indian indentured labourers who’d been brought to the region to work on colonial sugarcane and tobacco plantations years before. Some of the men who regularly transported Donna to school by bike were delivery boys at the successful department store managed by her grandfather, Frank Gomes.

As for Gwen—she essentially became a stranger to Donna, visiting Georgetown only once when the author’s brother became seriously ill with nephritis. During her childhood, Donna collected snippets of information about her mother (she was beautiful, athletic, studious, and courageous enough to stand up to Donna’s grandfather), but the girl knew little about her father. One gets the sense she was not overly troubled by her mother’s absence—although an aunt would later explain that Donna was intensely distressed when her mother first left for Canada but had then seemingly forgotten about it—nor does she appear to have had any great curiosity about her parents. Her father’s story would only be pieced together much later.

Nebenzahl provides considerable detail about her day-to-day life in Georgetown. She describes the town; her grandparents’ rambling white house encircled by a corrugated metal wall—its rooms, including a three-sided tower where her grandparents sat each evening, and the home’s environs; the appetizing food prepared by “Cookie”; the imaginative games she played with her cousins; her attendance at an Ursuline convent school (built in 1847 and run by Irish nuns) where she was an excellent student in spite of vision problems that went unnoticed for some time; the rituals of church attendance and Sunday-afternoon outings along parts of the 400 km-long sea wall; and summer vacations further inland at the homes of a couple of her aunts whose husbands helped to manage sugarcane plantations on the Demerara River.

The children would be reunited with their mother in Canada in 1959 when Donna was 10. Life there, as one would expect, was quite a contrast. There were major adjustments to be made: to school, to the cold, and to food. In her thirties, Donna’s mother married a man of 25, the very age at which her first husband had died. Bill was rigid, extremely strict, and through her adolescence Donna was at perpetual loggerheads with him. (Only in his final years did the two become friends.) She left home at 18 for university. It could be argued that her university education provided her with the tools to understand her past.

The author writes that during her childhood in British Guiana she had no sense that she was living through “the difficult birth pangs of a country already tainted with the terrible usage of human beings”—a country which was “about to move from colonialism to a fractured new identity.” To her, the land was a sort of tropical paradise, a place of sunshine, good food, love and happiness. From cold, grey Montreal, she writes: “I hold Georgetown in my imagination as a green and sparkling city.”

By the time Donna was born, her family’s Portuguese stories and ways of doing things had combined with British customs. In fact, the culture of British Guiana was the product of the melding of traditions of multiple ethnicities: European, East Indian, African, and Caribbean. The Amerindians were, of course, the first in the region—and still represent a tenth of the population. The Dutch were the earliest Europeans to settle there in the late seventeenth century. Their tobacco-and-sugar-plantation colony subsequently changed hands numerous times, with the French and English often in conflict over it. The British took full control of the region in 1814-1815 after the Napoleonic Wars, governing the country, the only English-speaking one in South America, until its independence in 1966. Currently, the largest ethnic group in this diverse nation are the Indo-Guyanese at around 40% of the population; second are those of African ancestry at nearly 30%. The other 20% of the population are Guyanese of mixed ancestry.

On her mother’s side, Nebenzahl is the descendant of indentured labourers. They came from Madeira, a Portuguese island off the coast of Morocco, once the foremost producer of sugar in the world. Facing economic hardship and starvation in a land that had basically been ruined by sugarcane, they were among the approximately 30,000 Madierans who travelled to work on Guiana’s cane plantations between 1835 and 1882. With the demise of slavery, there was a shortage of labourers. When their indentures ended, many stayed and went into small business, eventually becoming landowners. They pragmatically abandoned their Portuguese language but held onto Catholicism. Nebenzahl’s family would work hard to gain social status; however, they could never fully escape the British view of the Portuguese as uneducated, Catholic, and therefore inferior. According to the author, some scholars suggest that the Portuguese did so well because they received preferential treatment by the British, who used them as a buffer against the emancipated Blacks.

For me, the most compelling section of Nebenzahl’s book concerns what she, as an adult, was finally able to piece together about her father, George Nebenzahl. Her mother’s sisters were able to talk about him and provide a sense of his personality and demeanour. (Gwen who did not wear her heart on her sleeve, seldom spoke of George, and Donna would come to believe that she had been traumatized by his death and never fully recovered from the loss.) The aunts all agreed George was stunningly handsome, and there was a photo album of his to prove it.

In the end, the most important information about him came to the author in somewhat surprising ways. First, her father’s younger sister, Gloria, now living in the US, made contact with Donna, who was then in her late twenties. Donna visited her aunt and over time learned about her father’s mother, Ena Hart, whom Gloria described as “willful and neglectful.” Beautiful she may have been, but she was not a good mother, and even her son had disapproved of her, choosing not to attend her funeral. A British citizen, Ena had been living in Georgetown with her parents when, at 16, she somehow met George’s father, Joseph Nebenzahl, a man ten years her senior, and ran off with him to Europe. George Jr. was born two years later. Whether Ena and Joseph had ever actually married is unclear. No marriage certificate has been located. Whatever the case, Ena ended up leaving Joseph. She went on to marry at least three more times, even running off to New York City for a time and bearing a third child. She had left George and Gloria in British Guiana in the care of her miserable parents. The children had a terrible time of it.

Other clues about her father and her paternal grandfather would come from three people who contacted Donna. These were other Nebenzahls, asking if she might be related to them and to a Jewish ancestor in Galicia (now southeastern Poland and western Ukraine). In the end, a Belgian researcher tracked down records of Joseph Nebenzahl, Donna’s paternal grandfather, and uncovered his fate in the Holocaust. A genetic test confirmed that Donna was not only of Portuguese but also of Jewish ancestry.

While there are reflective passages towards the end of <i><b>To Linger with You</i></b> in which the author reveals her feelings about having been abandoned by her mother, on the whole this is not a book that explores memory and past experience through an intimate subjective and introspective lens so much as it is a work of reportage, a record of the author’s and her family’s past, presented in a cultural, historical, and even political context. Less a memoir than an autobiography, it reckons with Nebenzahl’s family’s complicity in and her own ignorance of Guyana’s colonial past. Ashamed of her childhood self for never once asking why those who did all the menial work were Black, the author observes that it took years for her “to see the foundation of exploitation, poverty, and brutality upon which the entire country was built.”

<i><b>To Linger with You</i></b> is certainly informative, but I sometimes found it to be quite dry reading. I wondered if the author was holding back on honest responses to events in her past out of love and respect for her mother, who had so tragically lost her young husband and whose life ended sadly with Alzheimer’s Disease. I suspect consideration for her large extended Guyanese-Canadian family may also have shaped Nebenzahl’s book. Almost all of the author’s Georgetown relatives came to Canada as part of the Guyanese diaspora that began in the 1970s, as the South American country, grappling with its new independence from Britain, was plagued by economic instability and civil unrest. Clear and well written, as one would expect from a journalist, this book is no doubt a valuable resource, a gift, for Nebenzahl’s family and perhaps for others with Guyanese ancestry. However, I’m less convinced of its appeal to a wider audience.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for providing me with a digital copy of this informative book about an unusual childhood.

A beautiful memoir about the author’s search for the truth about her father.

Told in exquisite detail and switching between coziness and traumatic events, the story is told with a great deal of care.

To Linger With You

Donna and her brother lived with her grandparents in the midst of her extended family in British Guiana, now Guyanna, until she immigrated to Montreal to live with her mother at the age of ten. Moving from this Caribbean colony to Canada to live with the mother she barely knows was a huge adjustment. At some point in her life she dug into her family history, particularly looking for information about her father who died when she was a toddler.

Her journey of discovery is enthralling, and sometimes heartwarming.