The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler

The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler

Description of the Medium: The Plot, Storyline, and the Major Characters

Today’s family life is increasingly becoming dynamic.  With increasing globalization, cross-cultural interactions, and mediation of technology in all facets of human life, the distance relationship is getting on the rise, and multicultural families are becoming a prevalent phenomenon. The medium is a novel by Nancy Richler (2013), which glimpses at the complications in the lives of a Canadian Jewish discourse post World War II.  This paper refers to the novel to examine the validity of its portrayal of families. The novel’s thrill works profoundly, thereby providing a retrospective of a past cultural delineation. The book presents the early stages of young families and the challenges in starting and running a famil. The protagonist in the novel is Lily Azerov Kramer, who arrives in a foreign nation to get married to Sol Kramer. In spite of the prior arrangements made for her, she only ends up marrying her brother, Nathan, following Sol’s non-acceptance of a marital arrangement. During the bridal event, Sol comes to meet Elka, who is the daughter to another woman claiming to be having a cousin of a similar name to Lily’s. It happens that the protagonist had appropriated a dead woman’s identity, including the late woman’s diary and a pure uncut gem she came with. The protagonist later escapes leaving a young daughter, Ruth, with her brother. The daughter matures up and suddenly receives an encrypted note and a stone ostensibly sent by her mother. More packages follow the initial one, and the daughter starts to doubt her identity and that of her unknown mother. In deploying iconic imagery, the author avers a vibrant image of the community, its common trends, and associations within the previous century. Successful family formation requires geographical closeness; a marital bliss will only come from on true love, commitment, honest representation of identity, and accommodative home setting.

Nancy Richler presents a pessimistic view of the prospects of starting an unwavering and strongly-bonded family out of a long-distance relationship. After being in a relationship with Sol Kramer, a relationship that they maintained solely by correspondence, Lily Azerov Kramer travels to Canada to Join Sol Kramer, marry and start a family. However, Sol rejects her in the first instance, upon setting his eyes on her. He firmly refuses to undertake the nuptials and runs away from Lily.  The kind of rejection Lily gets is inconsistent with the love they expressed to one another in their correspondences and before the meeting.  Out of desperation, Lily accepts to shift her commitment to Sol’s brother, Nathan Kramer, who eventually marries her despite not having known each other earlier. Nancy (2013) seems to suggest that, however much those in the relationship may feel excited with a ‘deep’ sense of love, such feelings are mere infatuations, and no credible commitment can arise out of them, as to make the proper foundation for the family.

Nancy’s implicit suggestion that a long-distance relationship is not strong enough for the formation of a proper marriage is the reality of relationships and receives overwhelming from support relationship studies. According to Billedo, Kerkhof, and Finkenauer (2015), geographical distance substantially impairs relationships across all the stages of re relationship – while dating and while in marriage. Lily’s and Sol’s dated by correspondence, with a significant geographical separation; Lily lived between Palestine and Poland until the time she set off to meet Sol, and Sol who all along lived in Canada. The relationship quality (commitment, sacrifice, love, romantic attraction) was, therefore, too low from the start. Sol did not find it offensive running away from Lily as he never felt any emotional commitment to commit to the marriage. This embarrassment would not arise if they knew each other physically. When the intention to form a family eventually aborts and Lily has to adjust to a new partner, then then it should not have come as a surprise. Young people intending to form families should strive to break physical barriers and give a room for physical bonding.  According to Carter et al. (2016, p.577), sex, love, emotional connection, and security are integral ingredients of a healthy relationship in which people get better when there is geographical proximity. However, they come under threat in a long-distance relationship. Lily and Sol completely missed such opportunities at a time when they appear to have been ‘dating.’ A collective reflection of a similar situation is in the social media relationships in which people date over social media, and the first instance of the meeting is possible to make nuptial or cohabiting arrangements. Stafford (2016) presents the psychological perspective on reasons to wary about distance relationships as a foundation of family formation. He finds that people who prefer to maintain relationships through social media (or other means avoiding direct physical contact) are one who suffers low self-esteem.

Consequently, they may not assert what they stand for and expend in a relationship. Lily’s low self-esteem becomes evident when she readily accepts Nathan as an alternative husband. She lacks the will to asset her interest or to insist on cancellation of nuptial arrangement all together so that she may focus on her life.

Nancy further exposes the unrealistic expectation of love in marriage; couples cannot invest love in marriage when no compatibility or attraction existed in the prenuptial stages. While Nathan eventually ‘saved’ Lily by accepting her as a wife, to mitigate the embarrassment of his brother, Nancy’s portrays their marital life as a dull one with no scintilla of enthusiasm, love, Romance, or care. One may think they are strangers. It is unimaginable that days after becoming a husband and a wife, they had not even greeted each other with a palm of their hand. They had not consummated their marriage, and they were seated on the couch, which they should have used for consummation. Lack of attraction and interest on each other becomes evident in the fact that they could even count the number of times they had looked at each other on the face.  While one may think Nancy’s description is an overstatement, the circumstances under which they became a husband and wife make the author’s account credible.  Franceschelli (2016) emphasizes that marriage should be a personal choice, and one should have love as a primary motivation. Forced or arranged marriages deprive one of free Lily, and Nathan’s love did not start of love.

Similarly, McKenzie and Dales (2017) find that love, commitment, and compatibility are essential for a lasting and fulfilling relationship at all stages. Nathan and Lily’s marriage eventually fails, and Lily flees away, leaving the husband with a young child.  Consistently Rokach and Philibert-Lignières (2015) note that lack of intimacy correlates with loneliness, situations that quickly establish marriages. With such a poor start of a relationship, and severe deficiency in intimacy, Lily found herself out of place; she became lonely and had to seek for freedom elsewhere. The author realistically conveys a message party must not expect the miraculous occurrence of love when the marriage is out of convenience or due to sympathy for a spouse. Sympathetic emotions are not strong enough to evoke a commitment level that will sustain the emotional, psychological, and social struggles over time.

Nancy also portrays the concept of home, link with identity in giving the Canadian immigrant communities a sense of security and peace of mind. The title “The Imposter Bride” refers to Sol’s (turned Nathan’s) bride. Home is a place to get security-social, emotional, and social. The ‘impostor’ bride makes efforts to edit her identity to fit into the Jewish family so that she can feel at home. The bride appropriated the identity of one Lily Azerov Kramer, a woman who dies years ago. Lily does her identity theft so meticulously that it becomes unmanageable to doubt her. She has the disease’s personal belongings, including the ID, diary, scribbling frosted stones, notebook, and pair of woolen stockings. She even takes time to memorize the content of the notebook pages. Sasson et al. (2017) find that even as members of Jewish communities intermarry with the non-Jewish, the Jewish parents and family members still hold dear to Jewish cultural identity. As such, a Jewish bride is likely to get overwhelming endorsement and a friendly environment. Underlying Nancy’s description is the overt indication of exclusion that couples of concordant identity face vis-à-vis accommodative attitude of Canadian immigrant communities towards family members who share with them identity. It is unlikely that Nathan would have compromised his choice and accepted Lily if she had not shown an enthusiastic Jewish identity. She feels out of place when Elka exposes her scheme. She can no longer feel secure because her source of security-identity will no longer hold to assist her.

Nancy passes a message that family relationships will thrive when people connect emotionally and physically from the start, and when they appreciate the diversity of identity, rather than conform to a fake identity.  A question for family scholars is whether long-distance relationships could lead to the formation of stable families. Nancy firmly relies on the negative, and she presents Lily’s, and Sal’s aborted relationship as an attestation. Physical separation weakens commitment and weakens relationship quality. Nancy also reveals the reality that compatibility, attraction, and unconditional love are the foundation of long-lasting contemporary relationships.  The weak foundation of love in the prenuptial stages and the course of the marriage damages the commitment of partners, and the strength of the marriage becomes a concern. About cross-cultural families, issues of identity also arise, not only for children born in the relationship but even between the spouses. For the Canadian communities that are highly conservative, such as the Jewish Canadians new partner joining a discordant culture is torn between their family identity and a new identity.

References

Billedo, C. J., Kerkhof, P., & Finkenauer, C. (2015). The use of social networking sites for relationship maintenance in long-distance and geographically close romantic relationships. Cyberpsychology,Behavior, and social networking, 18(3), 152-157.

Carter, J., Duncan, S., Stoilova, M., & Phillips, M. (2016). Sex, love and security: Accounts of distance and commitment in living apart together relationships. Sociology, 50(3), 576-593.

Franceschelli, M. (2016). Love Relationships and Marriage: Agency, Islam and Culture. In Identity and Upbringing in South Asian Muslim Families (pp. 125-161). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

McKenzie, L., & Dales, L. (2017). Choosing love? Tensions and transformations of modern marriage in Married at First Sight. Continuum, 31(6), 857-867.

Richler, N. (2013). The Imposter Bride: A Novel. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.

Rokach, A., & Philibert-Lignières, G. (2015). Intimacy, loneliness & infidelity. The Open Psychology Journal, 8(1).

Sasson, T., Aronson, J. K., Chertok, F., Kadushin, C., & Saxe, L. (2017). Millennial children of intermarriage: Religious upbringing, identification, and behavior among children of Jewish and non-Jewish parents. Contemporary Jewry, 37(1), 99-123.

Stafford, L. (2016). Marital sanctity, relationship maintenance, and marital quality. Journal of Family Issues, 37(1), 119-131.