Leah Hager Cohen’s novel To & Fro is as inventive in its form as it is compelling.
Foreword Reviews wrote of the book:
“Leah Hager Cohen’s magnificent turn-and-read novel To & Fro is a tour de force peek into the wilds and wounds of childhood. . . . With ‘nary an end’ and triumphs aplenty, To & Fro is a luminescent novel that makes treasures of childhood wonder, whose heroines’ curiosity reflects the wisdom of sages.”
In her own words, here is Leah Hager Cohen’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel To & Fro:
The sound of snow falling on snow. The sound of a pencil moving across paper. The sound of walking. Of a child talking to herself under her breath. Of water – as it bubbles up from a spring or laps against rocks. These more than anything else make up the would-be soundtrack of To & Fro. These together with silence, the infinite variety of silences we come to know if we attend closely to the world’s signs and wonders.
But music is a wonder too.
Some music, then –
Dona Nobis Pacem, trad.
There’s a scene in the To portion of the book in which Ani’s mother teaches her a song in a language she doesn’t know, sung in parts that “fit together.” My own mother taught me “Dona Nobis Pacem,” a round sung in Latin, one day as we were driving from our home in Nyack, New York to the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I was ten. My mother had taken me out of school for a whole month so we could both participate in the Bread and Puppet Theater’s production of Oswald Von Wolkenstein. It was a wonderful, strange month, during which we learned to walk on stilts, helped create sets, and during rehearsal breaks ate Hungarian pastry and watched peacocks strut around the Cathedral grounds. Here it is without words, played by Yo-Yo Ma.
Aequilibrium, by Andrew Vinogradov
This also goes with the To portion of the book. Along her journey, Ani encounters a great number of people – along with donkeys, chickens and dogs – camped out inside a big tunnel during a rainstorm. Even before reaching the mouth of the tunnel, she hears a peculiar music coming from inside, “Not human voices so much as gears of sound, singing in a tongue composed of light, shapes and patterns winding back upon themselves, twining in the queer firelit gloom, these creaturely ribbons, rhythms circling round, snaking together with the scent of smoke and spice and soapsuds and squash blossoms and snow…” The music turns out to be produced by a hurdy gurdy, and sounds in my head very like this song.
I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, by Sinéad O’Connor
My novel began as a whimsical sort of experiment. Like a tiny wildflower growing from the side of a mountain, it sprung out of a Kafka parable, My Destination. In the parable, a man declares he has no need of provisions, even though he is embarking on an “immense” journey. How perfectly this song speaks to the mystery of that. I wonder what Franz would have made of this song?
Breaths, by Sweet Honey in the Rock
I like it when we hear the incidental sounds of music making. Intimate artifacts of the humble human labor that goes into the production of art: soft squeak of fingers moving across frets, minute clicking of valves as they’re depressed and released, and intakes of breath: the pause to fill the lungs before producing the next note. If the previous song by Sinéad O’Connor makes no attempt to cover or quiet that sound, this song incorporates audible breathing even more centrally. And the words speak to what both Ani and Annamae feel so deeply – that there is something, something beyond what we see, what we know, what scientists tell us exists. Perhaps we have only to, as the song counsels, “listen more often to…the rustling trees…the groaning woods…the crying grass…the moaning rocks.”
Boatman Dance, trad.
This one is for the ferryman. I didn’t originally expect him to be the sole character who shows up in both To and Fro (I didn’t expect any character to transverse the line between the two worlds), but it seems fitting that if anyone should, it would be him. For what is a ferryman but one who bridges separate shores? Including a piece by Elizabeth Cotten is also a wink to the scene in Fro where Leslie, the instructor at the after-school program called Art Explorers, plays Elizabeth Cotten tunes for Annamae.
Take Me To the Water, by Nina Simone
Another thing I didn’t know until late in the day was that both stories would end with their protagonists at the water’s edge. Yet a kind of wateriness informed the writing of this book, which emerged from a back and forth flow. This song links ritual immersion in water with the idea of “going back home.” A simple phrase, but the more I roll it over my tongue, the more I feel how many meanings it could have. What is home? What does it mean to return there? Where were we before we were born? Where do we go when we leave?
The Water, by Johnny Flynn, featuring Laura Marling
Another water song. The music rocks us like a lullaby while the words deliver a silver-bright truth at once terrible and consoling: death is within us and without us, in us and about us – and it severs us from nothing. Ani and Annamae each carry within them a yearning that is made sharper for their inability to name it. And yet this emptiness, this loneliness, this longing headlong sense of lack, which draws each of them ultimately to a body of water – for Ani, the sea; for Annamae, the banks of the Hudson River a few miles from where it spills into the Atlantic – does not isolate them. On the contrary. It is the very thing that connects them, both to the seen and unseen world and to each other.
Durme, Durme, trad.
Let’s finish with an actual lullaby. Here is one sung in Ladino by the late great Jewlia Eisenberg. The translation reads:
Sleep, sleep my little one, sleep well
Close your lustrous eyes and sleep
When you wake you will study Torah
What a funny thing to promise a child: that upon waking they get to go and study! But in To & Fro we learn of the ancient ritual in which children just learning to read are allowed to lick honey from a slate printed with the letters of the aleph-bet, so they might discover that learning is sweet.
And what is this thing, this Torah that the child is preparing to study? At its most capacious, it’s something polyphonic, inclusive, unending. It contains both the written and oral tradition – Torah shebichtav and Torah sheba’al peh – encompassing all the commentary and interpretations, from the ancient through the contemporary, that have already been added, as well (astonishingly) as those yet to come.
What a thing, indeed, to promise a child: that they might wake to the world and go forth into it, tasting all the voices and stories they encounter. That the vast unknowable world is available to them and they may move through it with wonder and curiosity: sometimes listening, sometimes babbling, sometimes singing, and all the while, inevitably – without even trying – weaving their own stories into the always-becoming whole.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Leah Hager Cohen’s playlist for her book I Don’t Know
Leah Hager Cohen is the author of seven novels, including To & Fro, and five works of nonfiction, including Train Go Sorry. Among other honors, her books have been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, named a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and selected as best books of the year by the New York Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Globe and Mail, Christian Science Monitor, and Kirkus Reviews. Cohen is the Barrett Professor of Creative Writing at the College of the Holy Cross. She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.