Lilian Nattel - Biography

Lilian Nattel was born in Montreal and lives in Toronto with her husband and two daughters. The River Midnight, was published to international acclaim and won the Martin and Beatrice Fischer Jewish Book Award. .

Author's Notes
I grew up in Montreal. My mother was born in Plotsk, Poland and my father in Crakow. My parents spoke Yiddish at home when they didn't want us kids to understand, so of course I learned it well.

Photograph by Toru Kotani

In my research this has been a great asset, allowing me to read prayers, poems and memoirs in the original.

My family wasn't Sabbath observant, we went to synagogue only on the High Holy Days; nor did we follow the Jewish dietary laws (kashrut). But our home was permeated by Jewish culture in a way that interwove with the surrounding secular culture: stories and songs and customs that both expressed the particularity of our background and the universality of human experience. This then has become the foundation of my work as a writer: using the images of Jewish experience to explore the human condition and especially women's lives.

We celebrated all the major holidays and my father used to explain them to me in a way that seemed relevant and real and present. On Passover when he said that we ourselves had been slaves in Egypt, I could picture it. I could see us there. And then he would also say that he had been a slave and had been liberated from the concentration camp. So I knew that what happened to people then, that is in "history", is also happening now: both in a thematic sense and also in an eery spiritual sense, past and present and future can come together.

I'm fascinated by history, seeing our present being shaped in the past. This has led me to explore the issues that are important to me, whether it is women's friendship, motherhood, reconciliation or adoption in the historical times and places that have so much influenced who I am now.