Publisher: She Writes Press
Released: 2019
reviewed by Bronwyn
Mauldin
For people
of faith, the idea of some kind of supernatural being keeping watch over you
every day, I imagine to be both a comfort and a terror. Your needs, fears, and
desires are under constant scrutiny. One day you will fail your god. But what
if you are watched over without your knowledge? What if the god is of a faith
and culture not your own? This is the intriguing starting point for Judith
Teitelman’s Guesthouse for Ganesha.
When Esther
Grünspan is abandoned by her fiancé on her wedding day in 1923, she flees her
tight-knit Polish shtetl and travels to Köln, Germany, to make her heartbroken
way in the world. Trained as a seamstress from childhood, she earns her living
by her unrivaled skill with needle and thread. As she struggles to survive, to
learn language and culture, she hardens her heart to love and friendship. She
seems to want to be entirely unseen. Look at my work, her actions cry
out, not at me.
A loveless
marriage follows, then the Nazis. A network of good people move Esther from
home to apartment to boarding house, from country to country. They provide
false papers and sewing assignments, everything from simple hems to elaborate
gowns. Sewing is both her refuge and livelihood.
Esther’s life
expands and contracts across a backdrop of some of the greatest horrors of the
20th century; we see crimes against humanity play out in the life of
one woman. Watching with us is the elephant-headed god Ganesha of the Hindu
pantheon. She encounters him in park in Köln, but does not know him as a god.
His role in her life as a remover of obstacles is invisible to her. She does
not see him give a cookie to distract her fretful daughter so she can finish a
gown for a wealthy socialite in time for a party. She does not see him turn a
head at just the right moment or move a hand to sign a document that allows her
to escape to safety.
Still, like so
many gods and superheroes, Teitelman’s Ganesha is not omnipotent. He can soothe
a querulous child and save a single life, but he cannot prevent the Holocaust.
In the
aftermath of the war, the story of Guesthouse for Ganesha takes a
startling turn to fantasy. So, too, did arts and literature abandon the
limitations of realism in the post-war period. Esther walks away from a life
that has both sustained and constrained her, opening herself to a Hindu god of
letters and learning who has, she discovers, watched over her with love and
compassion all along.
Bronwyn
Mauldin writes fiction and facts, and is creator of The Democracy Series
zine collection. Her newest short story appears in the 2019 Gold
Man Review. More at bronwynmauldin.com.
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