Lara Fremder, L’ordine apparente delle cose (The apparent Order of Things)

Lara Fremder
The apparent Order of Things
Novel

In Jerusalem, a tour guide, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, grapples with the pain of the past. Delving into her family’s secrets, she will ultimately have to choose between oblivion and a chance for reconciliation. Lara Fremder delivers an extraordinary, powerful, and timely story.

The Apparent Order of Things by Lara Fremder: a brilliant and profound novel set within the walls of Jerusalem.

The protagonist is Rachele Zwillig, a 41-year-old tour guide who drinks gin and tonic during Shabbat, refuses to define herself as Jewish, and above all, refuses to let anyone else define her identity. A free and intelligent woman with a troubled life, Rachele spends her days recounting the Holy Land to foreigners, shaping the history of places according to the needs of those before her: a group of Japanese tourists and an elderly couple from Geneva are not the same, and she switches narratives accordingly, sometimes gentle, sometimes arrogant. The important thing is to do her job as she wishes without letting it breach the armor she has built over the years to protect her emotions: not an easy feat in Jerusalem for a daughter of Holocaust survivors. For this reason, she tells many lies: to her friends, to herself, and to her own family, of which, after her mother’s suicide, only a distant father, a mysterious brother, and five indecipherable photographs remain.

Rachele, who has spent her whole life trying to escape the pain of the past, will feel the need to investigate the secrets shrouding her family for the first time. Following the only traces left behind, an old painting and the face of a stranger in one of the photographs, she will finally come to terms with her own history, choosing between oblivion and anger or a chance for reconciliation.

Lara Fremder, the daughter of a Polish Jew who survived the extermination, through the story of her protagonist, tells that of an entire country: like a cry echoing within the walls of Jerusalem, Rachele Zwillig’s story is a powerful metaphor that touches the heart and questions the present. Explaining Lara Fremder says, “As the daughter of a survivor, I struggled for a long time to process the suffering. Rachele’s story is somewhat mine as well. It is the heirs of the victims of the Holocaust, today, but not only them, who have the task of overcoming the pain while preserving the memory. Moving out of the role of victim allows us to close the circle. Like Rachele, we are faced with a choice: to fuel ferocity or to affirm humanity.”

EXCERPT
“My name is Rachele Zwillig, and I will be your guide. I want to tell you right away that here, maps and satellites are of no use. Here, it’s good to get lost. Getting lost means not seeking answers, so don’t ask me questions unless absolutely necessary. Don’t interrupt your bewilderment in the face of apparent certainties. Maintain the disorientation, maintain it as much as possible because that’s what holds value.
And when you have the feeling of having found yourselves, looking around, you’ll experience an inevitable contradiction: on one side, objective reality with all its margins of error, on the other, the unique reality, the one you perceive and which varies according to knowledge, experience, emotional state. And still, it won’t be enough, because your feelings will depend on the clouds, the wind, the blue of the sky, the season, the light. Here, no one can give you certainties. Not even me, obviously. So, someone might ask: why should we pay a guide to navigate through the walls of this ancient city without having any certainty? I don’t know. Payment, not by chance, is upfront. Follow me…”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lara Fremder was born in Milan, where she currently resides. She collaborated for many years with Studio Azzurro, an international artistic research entity. She has written scripts and screenplays for films that have received numerous awards and have been presented in competition at major international film festivals, including Marco Bechis’s Garage Olimpo. She writes documentaries and animated films. As a director, she has helmed two short films based on her own stories, winning the Grand Prix with the film Blu Sofa at the Clermont Ferrand International Short Film Festival. She teaches screenwriting at the International Conservatory of Audiovisual Sciences in Locarno and at the Luchino Visconti Civic School of Cinema in Milan. The Apparent Order of Things is her debut novel.

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