Reflection's Edge

Book Review: The Dybbuk in Love, by Sonya Taaffe

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft

Clare is a haunted and lonely kindergarten teacher, Menachem a century-old spirit who routinely possesses the flesh of others to court her. The Dybbuk in Love is their unlikely love story.

Sonya Taaffe is a writer who sees love and desire as something essential as breathing, and her words often flow with the ease and fluidity of breath. This is true of the work contained in her collections of poetry and fiction Postcards from the Province of Hyphens and Singing Innocence and Experience and of The Dybbuk in Love, her first stand-alone chapbook.

A slim book at forty-five pages, The Dybbuk in Love has volumes to say about desire and longing, and how they can be simultaneously terrifying and transcendent.

The story follows Clare, a young woman pursued by Menachem, a dybbuk from early 20th Century Russia. A figure from Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is the wandering soul of a dead person with the ability to possess the living, which Menachem does with distressing frequency. Though Clare resists his advances – Menachem is not only relentless, he's also unfairly using other people to get to her – she finds herself drawn by the long-lost history and culture he represents.

Sometimes, when she gave him time enough for the loan of lips and tongue to tell a story, he shared tales of Lilith and Ketev Mriri, mazzikim like smoke stains and tricksters who could swindle even Ashmedai, even Metatron. The names of his parents, Zvi and Tsippe. His three sisters who had read Shaykevitsh while their brother read Zola in translation.

You are the only living soul who remembers them now.

Through this study of his past and his culture, Clare soon finds her thoughts and dreams centered around the love-struck dybbuk, until it becomes difficult to determine which one of them is truly trying to possess the other.

As always, Taaffe's writing is elegant and impressionistic. Whether describing her characters' emotions or the landscape changing from summer to autumn, Taaffe evokes the scene in the reader's mind through startling image and subtle detail. Her preference for suggestion over concrete detail keeps her writing fresh and interesting. Drawn with the same impressionistic skill, Taaffe's characters, Clare and the dybbuk, come across as complex and ultimately very wounded and human – as most people are when they fall deeply in love.

"Menachem." Something like ice and brandy sunfished up into her throat, sluice and burn past her heart; she put it from her, as she had weeks ago put away her surprise. Wondering for how long this time, she gave her greeting to this new face. "I was wondering when you'd turn up."

"Constellations follow the Pole Star; I follow you."

The Dybbuk in Love is a gorgeous, haunting book perfect for early autumn reading, when the air becomes a little colder and thoughts a little darker. A fascinating look at Jewish legend, it's also a passionate love story that never resorts to cliché or melodrama to make its points about the terrifying nature of want and desire.

Singing Innocence and Experience, by Sonya Taaffe

Postcards from the Province of Hyphens, by Sonya Taaffe

Yiddish Folktales (Library of Yiddish Classics) , ed. Beatrice Weinreich

Possessed, by the Klezmatics (music CD)



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