Distantly Related to Freud - A Coming of Age Story

I just finished Distantly Related to Freud by Ann Charney the other day.  I read it 'blind', without even reading the jacket description.  As it opens, I imagined it to be a story of Holocaust survivors creating a new life for themselves in 1950s Montreal.  It seemed, after the first few pages to be about struggle and the things people have to overcome in order to create a sense of normalcy.

But it wasn't.

I had to spend a bit of time thinking about whether I was disappointed that Charney instead wrote a normal story about a normal life.  In the end I decided that I wasn't; she had created a character, Ellen, and a novel that explored something real and relatable.  Ellen's coming of age among people who have been touched by tragedy and brutality does not prevent her life from being 'normal.'  She wants to know about sex and her own artistic ability.  She wonders about her difference from others and how to find her place in a world that is good to her but simultaneously full of people she can't quite feel completely connected to.

In that, it's a real story about a real life.  Charney's Ellen is particularly fascinating because she defies so many expectations.  The book opens in 1952 and continues through the 1960s, times of important social changes.  In Ellen, we see someone who was ready for those social changes and embraced them not as someone rebelling against social norms but as someone who simply questioned what she wanted in life.  Anyone familiar with Montreal and Quebec society in the 1950s and 1960s knows that this makes Ellen a pretty remarkable character.  Those were conservative times.  Charney's understated description and narration serve to make Ellen something of a quiet hero, a young woman who is not openly defying a social order but who is simply changing it by following her own path.