First published by St Martins Press, 1994
“Impatient with all the gay men dying before they know who they are,” Tahar adds.
One manifesto a day, please.
How does one categorise loss? Loss of a relationship, of friends, of partners of friends, of pets, of grandmothers, of languages, of memories, of neighbourhoods, of memories of neighbourhoods, of whole lives lived in whole worlds which no longer exist?
Sacred Lips of the Bronx is a searing, transcendent novel which seeks to contain within it a journal of all of that loss. Loss so enormous it cannot be comprehended, so is presented in slivers of life of the main character, Mikey. In LA, he is losing his ten year relationship with Robert among the holocaust which they are both living through. Aids in the early 90s. They’ve already lost so much.
In Mikey’s memory of youth in the Bronx, he is losing his grandmother Freida, a Yiddish woman among a world of holocaust survivors and families of the same. Amongst it all, Mikey fears he is losing his mind.
The noun of loss is absence. Sadownick’s paired-back character-roster in both timelines is emblematic of the feeling of loss and actuality of absence which Mikey lives through. In the Bronx, the Jewish enclave is rapidly shrinking, to be found almost completely gone by the time of his present-day return. In LA, the tragedy of his floundering relationship stews in the desolate wasteland that is a gay man’s social life in the early 90s. Friends are dead. Lovers and potential lovers are dying or dealing with their own loss.
The dual timeline is two sides of the same character. Mikey is his Yiddish grandmother Freida. That’s what she was trying to tell him all along. The family she lost is the family he lost. She clung to her Jewish secrets shoved into Bronx closets, while he explored the tried and tested gay lifecycle of shifting from one love affair to the next. Jewish and gay life cycles occurring again and again, loss into life, memory into tradition, tragedy to tragedy.
Sadownick captures the generational trauma of what it means to be a gay and a Jewish man, of this particular generation and hereafter. Taking on the reins of life just as the dark threat of death begins to hover, threatening to wash away all attempts at self-actualization, or, as Tahar mentions in the book, people who will die before they know who they are.
Because who we are is a sodden mix of memory and tradition, of prejudices and prides baked into us through childhood. Of uncovering the hidden light breathed into us by a creator, then swamped with the smog of a busy road wafting through a chipped window into the bedroom in which we dreamed our first dreams. Who we are are the losses we have suffered. Our first loves, romantic and familial. Our brothers who left and parents who fought. The people who we craved to be, and those who we were not. The choices we made, and those we did not.
In the haunting final chapters, Freida shows Mikey all of the choices made, or not. The losses he had, or avoided.
But is something lost if it is remembered? In the start of the novel, Mikey frets about having lost his Yiddish and his memories of his grandmother. But, through a particularly gay, yet effective form of therapy, he remembers. He fears he has lost his love, but through memory, Mikey tentatively regains the muscle memory of how to love, and how to fall in love.
In a novel so painfully about loss, we are also shown the pathway forward. The noun of loss may be absence, but its antidote is memory. To remember means we do not lose our loved ones, even if they have passed from the physical world. Their memories can be alive, just as their impact on our lives can live, if we remember.
Just as we continue to learn from lives lived and lost in the holocaust by holding onto memory, so must we do the same through other holocausts, and in particular our own gay holocaust which stole so many lives, and created so much absence in its wake. Sadownick’s novel deserves to sit among the high table of Aids-era memories, an antidote to all of the gay Jews we lost.