'L.M. Montgomery' by Jane Urquhart. With an introduction by John Ralston Saul. Penguin 167pp.


     Think of Lucy Maud Montgomery and like a flash images of small town girls come to mind. There's the world famous 'Anne of Green Gables', 'The Golden Road',  'Emily of New Moon' and many other novels written by one of Prince Edward Island's most famous daughters.
      In these novels, young girls and later as teenagers overcome stern parents, small town rules and other obstacles to win a new life.
     But Lucy Maud Montgomery's life wasn't like that at all. "O God, such an end to life," the sixty something Montgomery wrote nine months before she died. "Such suffering and wretchedness."
     In this short biography, the talented novelist Jane Urquhart spells out the main high and low points of Montgomery's life. There were many low points and it's good that Urquhart has told us about them, though she could have written a little more about the novels Montgomery wrote.
      In any case Montgomery's mother died whan Lucy was two. Her father went off to Saskatchewan and Lucy rarely saw him. She was raised by two stern maternal grandparents. Her closest friend and cousin Frede was killed by the great flu epidemic of 1919.
    Montgomery married a troubled Presbyterian minister Ewan MacDonald. But MacDonald freaked out and dragged his wife down with him.
      "His beliefs," writes Urquhart, "resulted in a paranoid conviction that he had been born damned and that God hated him." This was the Presbyterian creed raised to an impossible to bear level.
   Also Montgomery ended up in lawsuits with her publisher who tried to pay her as little as possible. Many writers have had this problem.
     The last seven years of Montgomery's life were spent mostly in Toronto where her husband's problems caused her to feel terribly depressed. By now which is the 1930's, her rigid judgemental character had turned off her two sons, Chester and Stuart. Another son, Hugh dies after his birth. Chester ended up in prison for a while.
     Montgomery's life was at times tough going and Urquhart hasn't spared us the details. Still, she's written a beautiful last chapter which shows us the great appeal of Montgomery's fiction.
    "Trust the art, not the artist," D.H. Lawrence once wrote. Urquhart hasn't really done this but she's filled us in on the sad background to Montgomery's mostly escapist fiction. I enjoyed reading this book. My only regret is that Urquhart didn't tell us more about the novels Montgomery wrote.
   

Israeli Flick Shows The Great Divide

'Attack' Starring Ali Suliman and Raymond Ansalem. Directed by Zaeid Doueri. In Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles.


   The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, Israeli novelist Amos Oz once said, "is a conflict between right and right." In short, Israelis deserve their homeland but Palestinians deserve one too.
    But what happens when this conflict runs right through your life?
    It happens to Amin Jaafari (Ali Suliman) in this film. At the film's opening, Amin is a Palestinian who works in Israel, and has carved out a successful career there.
    He's given an award for his work in front of a crowd of cheering Israeli Jews. But then a suicide bomber kills a crowd of Israelis and the suicide bomber turns out to be Amin's wife Siham (Raymond Ansalem). A grief-stricken Amin launches a search to find out why his wife did this and how she hid her pro-Palestinian feelings for so long.
     "Your wife died for your redem[ption," a church father tells Amin in the occupied city of Nablus on Israel's West Bank. Amin and Sahim were secular Christians not Moslems.
     Amin, it seems, can never accept that his wife was a terrorist until his nephew tells him the truth. Nor at the film's end does he feel comfortable as an Israeli or a Palestinian. 
     Director Zaeid Doueri was born in Lebanon, lived in the U.S., and then shot the film in Israel.Because it was shot in Israel, and maybe due to its politics too, 22 countries have refused to show 'Attack' in their theatres.
     'The Attack' is a very fine film. Yet its message and the many Moslem countries that have banned it from their movie houses, show that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a long was from
ending.
     



  

Israeli Flick Shows the Great Divide.

Down On Her Luck in San Francisco

'Blue Jasmine' . A film directed and written by Woody Allen. Starring Cate Blanchett and Alec Baldwin.


   "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers," Blanche DuBois says in Tennessee Williams's play 'A Streetcar Named Desire'.
     In Woody Allen's latest film 'Blue Jasmine', Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) hasn't come to San Francisco to depend on strangers. Instead she's fled New York City to stay with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins). A widow of a now dead and ultra-rich, high level swindler named Hal (Alec Baldwin), Jasmine is now down on her luck and broke. 'Blue Jasmine' after all is a modern version of 'A Streetcar Named Desire'.
      Ginger and Jasmine  aren't genetic sisters either. They were both adopted by the same parents. Ginger lives with her two young sons in a crowded apartment.
   Both sisters try to find new lives in romance. Both are defeated in their quests. But Ginger has an old boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale) to fall back on as well as a former husband (Andrew Dice Clay) to forget. Jasmine isn't as lucky. Her husband Hal hanged himself in a prison.
    "There's only so many traumas you can withstand," a disturbed snobby Jasmine, whose real name was Jeanette, tells her two young nephews in a restaurant. Alas, this once rich wife of a multimillionaire crook can't withstand too much more pain. And we see her pain unfold in the past, told through flashbacks, and her poverty-stricken present. In the end she crashes.
    Woody Allen, who wrote the script for the film and directed it, has scored another triumph here. At the age of 78, his vision of life remains bleak and scary . But this better tale unfolds in the city of San Francisco which is still lovely to look at and that's a plus too.