We are thrilled to be notified of a review of Jay Prosser's Loving Strangers in Jewish Renaissance magazine's summer issue. Thanks are due to Michelene Wandor, for your kind words and excellent analysis. Read a short excerpt below, of the review titled 'Inside a wooden chest lay a mother's hidden love story' or purchase a copy of Summer 2024 here
The subtitle to Jay Prosser's new book Loving Strangers: A Camphorwood Chest, a Legacy, a Son Returns heralds the autobiographical excursion to come: encompassing continents, generations, religions and cultures, linking the personal with the political and uncovering strategies for survival.
Throughout, a camphorwood chest guides, with letters, postcards, photos and objects- of which an anklet, a baby's silver bracelet and a grandmother's handbag are among the most poignant.
Prosser's mother, May, came to England with the chest from her home in Singapore in 1961, to marry Keith, a British working class soldier, whom she had met at a party in 1960, when Keith had been based on the island state. Their intense two-month courtship came at the tail end of the British Empire, a historical irony that helped to make it possible for their "religious, cultural and racial differences" to become the "loving strangers" of the book's title.
Prosser writes in an easy, compelling style. Gertrude Stein wanted to write a memoir with songs as memory motifs, and here Some Enchanted Evening, from South Pacific, the 1950s musical, joins numbers by Doris Day and Nat King Cole to punctuate the love between May and Keith.
Camphorwood smells of cloves and cinnamon; it was used to build ships, and it is resistant and enduring. Late in the book, Prosser writes: "Camphorwood chests are like trusty friends and honourable lovers. They store and keep hidden the most precious belongings of migrants, of people who moved across oceans and worlds."
Not everyone will have a camphorwood chest to perfume a journey back in time. But we all have objects, photos, letters, handwriting, old cassette recordings - the traces of our families, the histories which made them and which they made in turn. Don't throw them away.
