Apart from Love by Uvi Poznansky
Apart from Love is not your typical love story. All-consuming, heart-wrenching, and dark, it is a family saga that starts when Ben returns to meet his father, Lenny, and his new wife, Anita. It is then that he discovers a family secret. How will they find a path out of conflicts, out of isolation, from guilt to forgiveness?
My Own Voice (“As told by Anita”):
Ten years ago, Anita started an affair with Lenny, in spite of knowing that he was married and that his wife was succumbing to a mysterious disease. Now married to him and carrying his child, how can she compete with Natasha’s shadow and with her brilliance in the past? Given Anita’s lack of education, how can she resist his compelling wish to transform her? Can she survive his kind of love?
Faced with the way he writes her as a character in his book, how can Anita find a voice of her own? And when his estranged son, Ben, comes back and lives in the same small apartment, can she keep the balance between the two men, whose desire for her is marred by guilt and blame?
The White Piano (“As told by Ben”):
Coming back to his childhood home after years of absence, Ben is unprepared for the secret, which is now revealed to him: his mother, Natasha, who used to be a brilliant pianist, is losing herself to early-onset Alzheimer’s, which turns the way her mind works into a riddle. His father has remarried, and his new wife, Anita, looks remarkably similar to Natasha—only much younger. In this state of being isolated, being apart from love, how will Ben react to these marital affairs, when it is so tempting to resort to blame and guilt? “In our family, forgiveness is something you pray for, something you yearn to receive—but so seldom do you give it to others.”
Behind his father’s back, Ben and Anita find themselves increasingly drawn to each other. They take turns using an old tape recorder to express their most intimate thoughts, not realizing at first that their voices are being captured by him. These tapes, with his eloquent speech and her slang, reveal the story from two opposite viewpoints.
Dealing with the challenging prospects of the marriage of opposites, this book can be read as a standalone novel as well as part of one of family sagas best sellers. Still Life with Memories is a family saga series tinged with family saga romance, fraught with marital issues, and riddled with the difficulty of connecting fathers and sons.
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About the author:
Uvi writes across a variety of genres: My Own Voice, The White Piano, and Apart From Love (literary fiction), The Music of Us and Dancing with Air (romance), The David Chronicles, Rise to Power, A Peek at Bathsheba, and The Edge of Revolt ((historical fiction), A Favorite Son (biblical fiction), Home (poetry), Twisted (horror) Now I Am Paper and Jess and Wiggle (children’s book.)
What inspired you to write your book?
I modeled the heroine, Anita, as the-opposite-of-me. She was to become a bold and spontaneous spirit, anything but repressed; a ‘distant sister’ to Eliza Doolittle, stuck somewhere in the middle of the play, a place where she has already acquired a lot of new vocabulary, but has not managed yet to shake off her grammar mistakes. Anita, at this point, is a work-in-progress. And, she tends to use the simplest, shortest words she can find, because they are the most direct. I totally share this with her! Other writers search for the most literary words, thinking it would make them sound highly intelligent, but in fact it distances them from the heart and guts of the reader.
Here is a short sample from the book:
The minute our eyes met, I knew what to do: so I stopped in the middle of what I was doing, which was dusting off the glass shield over the ice cream buckets, and stacking up waffle cones here and sugar cones there. From the counter I grabbed a bunch of paper tissues, and bent all the way down, like, to pick something from the floor. Then with a swift, discrete shove, I stuffed the tissues into one side of my bra, then the other, ‘cause I truly believe in having them two scoops—if you know what I mean—roundly and firmly in place.
Having a small chest is no good: men seem to like girls with boobs that bulge out. It seems to make an awful lot of difference, especially at first sight, which you can always tell by them customers, drooling.
I straightened up real fast, and it didn’t take no time for him to come in. I was still serving another customer, some obnoxious woman with, like, three chins. She couldn’t make up her mind if she wanted hot fudge on top or just candy sprinkles, and what kind, what flavor would you say goes well with pistachio nut, and how about them slivered almonds, because they do seem to be such a healthy choice, now really, don’t they.
He came in and stood in line, real patient, right behind her. So now I noted his eyes, which was brown, and his high forehead and the crease, the faint crease right there, in the middle of it, which reminded me all of a sudden of my pa, who left us for good when I was only five, and I never saw him again—but still, from time to time, I think about him and I miss him so.
I could feel Lenny—whose name I didn’t know yet—like, staring at me. It made me hot all over. For a minute there, I could swear he was gonna to ask me how old I was—but he didn’t.
And so, to avoid blushing, I turned to him and I said, boldly, “It’s a crime?”
And he said, “What?”
And I said, “To be sixteen. It’s a crime, you think?”
And he said, “Back in the days when I was young and handsome, that was no crime.”
And I countered with, “Handsome you still are!”
He had no comeback for that, and me, I didn’t have nothing with which I could follow it up. So I asked, “So? What kind of cone for you?” but that woman cut in, ‘cause I was still holding her three-scoops tower of pistachio nut on a sugar cone. And she started to cry out, and like, demand some attention here, because hey, she was first in line and how about whipped cream? Or some of that shredded coconut?
So I smiled at her, in my most cool and polite manner, and squeezed out a big dollop of whipped cream, which was awesome, ‘cause it calmed her down right away.
And I scattered some of them coconut flakes all over—quite a heap—and went even further, adding a cherry on top. At last, I raised the thing to my lips, because at this point, it was starting to drip already.
Then, winking at him, I passed my tongue over the top, and all around the ice cream at the rim of the cone, filling my whole mouth and, just to look sexy, also licking the tips of my fingers. Then I came around the counter, swaying my hips real pretty, and steadying myself over the wobbly high heels. I came right up to him, and before he could guess what kind of trouble I had cooked up in my head, I kissed him—so sweet and so long—on his lips, to the shouts and outcries of the offended customer.
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