by Rafaël Newman
For Eva, mère & fille; and for Tom
Yesterday was James Joyce’s birthday. His one-hundred-and-thirty-seventh. Or would have been, if he hadn’t died, in Zurich, in January 1941, but were instead swelling the ranks of the current generation of supercentenarians, their increasing longevity bedeviling the demographics departments of local life insurers. Joyce is buried in Fluntern Cemetery on Mount Zurich, his grave marked by a wry-looking seated effigy, like a jocular, unaccommodated Lincoln Memorial; he is further commemorated in the eccentric orthography of the names of the city’s two rivers, the Limmat and the Sihl, in a plaque mounted on the point at which they diverge downstream from the Swiss National Museum, where the letter “i” in both names has been replaced with a “j”.
As it happens, February 2 is also my Aunt Eva’s birthday. A native of Montreal, my mother’s sister now lives in that city again, after a peripatetic career spent in the service of Canadian diplomacy, among other pursuits, in London, Ottawa, Tokyo, Vientiane, Paris, Bangkok and Beijing. The family gathered not long ago, in a disconcertingly Kon Tiki-themed chalet in rural Ontario, to celebrate a significant edition of Eva’s birthday: in advance, at New Year’s, since that was when most members of our large extended family could take time off. And so on that occasion we were also all presented by Eva’s eldest, eponymous daughter with that year’s family calendar.
My cousin Eva and her husband have been assembling and self-publishing the calendar annually, at or around Christmas, for some time now, and its arrival by post marks the beginning of the year for many of us now resident in places far from the family’s base in eastern Canada. Each year’s calendar is typically given a theme, which determines the visual element at the head of each month – recent themes have included revolutions, architectural features of European capitals, and the family’s Jewish ancestry, the last with facsimiles of antique portraits of various great-grandparents; this year’s theme is birth practices around the world. But what particularly distinguishes this project, gives it its pleasantly idiosyncratic aspect, is the mingling of the dates of birth of our family members, printed on the appropriate days of the year, with the birth anniversaries of historical personalities and the dates of significant events. Read more »