Frances Itani
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Itani, Frances
Last Updated: Sep-22-2016
Duffin, Jacalyn
Primary Category: Literature / Fiction
Genre: Novel
Human Worth
Illness and the Family
Marital Discord
War and Medicine
Kenan Oak returns from World War I to a small Ontario town. He is virtually unable to speak and dares not venture from his home. Adopted by a reclusive uncle at an early age, he has no immediate family but his wife, Tressa, who loves him and accepts his disability with good grace. They have been trying to have a child without success, and the glimmers of Kenan's recovery are dauntingly few and faint. Slowly with the help of his uncle Am, he begins to go out at night for walks in the woods and skating on the ice of the lake.
Am and his wife Maggie have a strained marriage. She loves to sing and once aspired to a career in music, but instead she opted for Am and a farm—although now they live in town. Lukas, a gifted new musician arrives to direct the choir; he is a postwar immigrant from an unnamed European country, possibly Germany. He notices her talent and encourages her to sing solo at the upcoming New Year's concert. Unused to the attention, she is captivated by him, his mystique, his appreciation of her, and the return of joy through song. They have an affair, which is discovered by Am.
Well into the story, it emerges that Am and Maggie had lost two children to diphtheria, and this trauma is at the heart of their marital strife. It is why they left their farm and have grown apart. But Maggie imposed an edict of silence on this exquisitely painful past. In contrast, Tressa slowly encourages her silent husband to tell—by inventing stories for him and letting him revise. His adoptive uncle gives him a postage-stamp sized photograph of his nameless mother and grandmother; together they construct a story.
Maggie falls pregnant with Lukas's baby. She goes away to have the child but Am cannot accept it. Compounding Maggie's woe, she stays with Am—for all their strife, they are bound in their loss. She allows Tressa and Kenan to adopt her beloved baby.
Deafening
Chronic Illness/Chronic Disease
Disease and Health
Institutionalization
Born in 1894, Grania becomes deaf following scarlet fever at the age of two. Her mother never quite recovers from misplaced guilt over this outcome and is withdrawn. But Grania is well loved by the whole family, who run a hotel in a small town. Her older sister and their Irish-born grandmother see the child's intelligence and find ways to communicate with her by signs and words; they urge the parents to send her to a special school.By age nine, Grania is sent to the famous School for the Deaf in Belleville Ontario, founded by Alexander Graham Bell. Although the school is only a short distance from her home on the north shore of Lake Ontario, the child is not allowed to return for nine long months. At first she is overwhelmed with homesickness, but soon she finds kindred spirits among the other students and teachers and adapts to the life of the institution.
By 1915, her studies complete, Grania works at the school. There, she meets her future husband, Jim, a hearing man who is assistant to the town doctor. They marry, but only two weeks later, Jim leaves to serve as a stretcher bearer in the war in Europe. Fear and death haunt the people at home and abroad for years. Jim writes what little he is allowed of the horror and danger around him, always promising to return. Grania waits and writes too, slowly growing hopeless and angry, as devastating telegrams arrive one after the other.Her sister copes with the return of a grievously disfigured husband, wounded more in mind than in body. In late 1918, Grania falls ill in the influenza epidemic and is delirious for weeks. When she recovers, frail and bald, she learns of the loss of her beloved grandmother who died of the fever caught by nursing her. At the same moment she hears of the war's end and begins to believe again in hope.