In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Diane Botnick’s novel Becoming Sarah is an impressive debut, an epic generational saga.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Lyrically and meticulously composed . . . Not a traditional Holocaust story, Botnick’s narrative examines the effects of the detritus left behind by the great atrocity on those who survived as well as their offspring. . . . Painful, dramatic, and ultimately triumphant.”
In her own words, here is Diane Botnick’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Becoming Sarah:
Becoming Sarah is the story of a baby born and orphaned in Auschwitz. It’s a miracle she survives, but she’s no hero, just a toddler with nobody to tell her who she is or what she should become. And so she invents herself. Staying small and under the radar, she leaves Europe and makes her way to America. But for an outsider, a Survivor who doesn’t remember what she survived, the land of the free is no picnic either. Little white lies fill the void of her past and create a semblance of normalcy . . . for a time . . . but when the lies catch up with her, Sarah must finally reckon with what survival has cost, not only her, but the daughters and granddaughters who follow. As somber as this all sounds, the book has its share of irreverence. One of my early readers aptly dubbed Becoming Sarah a “subversive holocaust tale.”
A terrible loss in Sarah’s adult life breaks the novel into two parts: Before and After, the archetypal time zones of tragedy. Her Before is dominated by the voices of women. Not girls, not women on the rise, but women who’ve reached their prime, learning the hard way that the voice they’d always trusted, their instrument, this god-given gift, something they thought they could always count on, was the last thing in the world they should’ve taken for granted. I see a spot-lit stage, a woman with wild white hair standing at the mike, or maybe a piano. A woman refusing to see herself as washed up, seeing only a next chapter and savoring another go. A crone who opens her mouth and hears not a voice ruined but one born again in the lower range, a place where wisdom live.
Before’s playlist would have to include “Both Sides Now,” not the fluty original, the 2017 version that plummets in octaves, Joni’s “instrument” gunked by years of cigarettes and illness, the pace slowed, the rush over. The version that breaks your heart by actually sounding like what the song’s about, passage, patience, the chagrin of mortality, the evidence of having lived.
And “Guilt” from Marianne Faithful’s 1979 album Broken English, the naughty ingenue now a wailing bitch, done with the pain of unrequited love, now full of assurances that it’s easy to feel smug about being on the right side of life, but underneath simmers the perennial senseof being quietly bad and getting away with it. The growl of anger, of pain. The art of keeping one’s baser instincts at bay.
And Tracy Nelson’s “Down So Low,” not the 1968 original covered by female artists from Etta James to Cyndi Lauper, all capturing the grief of being spurned and the youthful certainty of never again reaching those heights of passion, but from her recorded performance, Live from Cell Bock D, just Tracy, alone at her piano, singing words she and so many others have sung a thousand times, but this time understanding the incredible last of pain, singing for an audience that understands it too, the change of tempo, like a heart slowing but not giving out or up, still singing to someone but no longer caring if they’re listening. The song seems now about process, how to age without panic, how to grab your second chance and then grab for a second second chance.
Also, Patti Smith’s “Wing,” a love poem to her daughter, accompanied by that daughter, Jesse Paris Smith, at a Town Hall concert (NYC) when the artist was in her seventies and tenderness had finally won out over cool.
And finally, two works that exist only in my imagination, one by a 90-year-old Doris Day doing a late-life reprise of “Que Sera Sera,” and the second by The Roches in their dotage, a cover of “Everybody’s Talkin at Me.”
A different tone and sensibility invades the second half of the book. After’s soundtrack is quieter, almost non-existent, like Sarah, whose years have caught up with her. Though her offspring move to the sturm and drang of a late 20th– early 21st-century teen’s playlist—Blondie, TLC’s “Waterfalls,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the whole of Jagged Little Pill, M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls” or “Bucky Done Gun,” anything loud, sullen, slutty, sad—Sarah proceeds in silence, shut down, uncommunicative, a woman who’s perfected the art of survival without ever having learned how to live.
It takes a big event to disrupt the silence. A gathering of those Survivors still standing, aged, feeble, but ready to bask in the tribute of thousands, simply for enduring until this 100th anniversary of the liberation of Hitler’s camps. It’s a digital shower of light and sound that takes on the momentum, the feel of an opera. Though there’s not an instrument to be seen, I hear music building stories within the story. I hear phrases and movements lashed together with threads of Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, “Knee 1 through 5,” the hastening tempo of a future its audience won’t likely ever see, and a fuzzy old recording of “Kaddish (for Natalie Ginsberg 1894-1956)” read by Allen Ginsberg, his voice choked with memory most have forgotten.
A medley takes shape. I hear Mandy Patinkin’s Yiddish rendering of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” the corn-ball organ intro, the voice made of tears sliding effortlessly into “God Bless America,” which might be better served snipped and tucked somewhere toward the end.
I hear the passion and complexity of the street. Richard Rodgers’ “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” from the ballet On Your Toes but here played by Liberace, yes, THE Mr. Fancy-pants, who nails the boogie woogie spirit of the city. And Leonard Bernstein’s dance from West Side Story, layered with passion and grit, “Mambo,” a shout that lands like a punch.
I hear Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner,” just its front-loaded assault of amped strings hawking the bitter irony of a country as much known for its national pride as its taste for blood, the home of the free and land of the conscripted. And in the next breath I hear the heraldry of brass, the sonorous beat of kettle drums in Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” Then bits of “Walking in Space” from Hair flirting with “See Me, Feel Me” from the rock opera Tommy.
And I’m not sure whether its Barack Obama I hear, expressing the nation’s grief over the killing of nine churchgoers in Charleston and then breaking away from his prepared speech to, seemingly on the spur of the moment, sing “Amazing Grace,” his untrained voice halting, pure. Or Meryl Streep singing the same, seated next to Cher in a car on a deserted road, Karen Silkwood and her only friend, facing the dark of night together. But what must follow is certainly the ubiquitous “Hallelujah.” Again, not the original, nor any of the many covers to follow. Once, on the subway, I encountered a busker strumming its plaintiff melody on a banjo, which seemed the oddest choice of instruments, but by the time I left him to catch my train, after many wordless choruses—perhaps more than even Cohen had anticipated—I was convinced it was the only way the song should ever be played. Basic but far from generic, every-man, humble, a most satisfying payoff for surviving a century of tumult.
What I hear is an overture, the piece meant to kick off a production, after the rustle of the gathering players, after the strings are tuned, calling the audience to order, familiarizing them with the melodies to come, an easily digested preview of the evening ahead. And I wish I knew how to do that. I wish I had a magic wand to wave over the compositions listed here, plucking and splicing the relevant phrase or movement from each, marrying the key of one to the next, neatening without sanitizing. Honestly, I don’t know how to make this work as an overture, or anything else, but I’m certain it must come at the end. Endings are the only beginnings worth remembering.
Diane Botnick was born and raised in the Midwest. She called New York City home for years, writing while working for various organizations in support of the arts. Becoming Sarah is her debut novel. She and her family currently live in Cold Spring, New York.