Review: Marrow Memory by Margaret Nowaczyk

A non-fiction review by Michael Greenstein

Whether listening through both ends of her stethoscope or describing her sensory experience of nature and personal history from Poland to Canada, pediatric geneticist Margaret Nowaczyk is a fine phenomenologist. Her essays of discovery in Marrow Memory arrive at the heart of matter and reveal why the heart matters. After ranging through various senses in relation to linden trees in “Sensorium,” she concludes: “Poetry’s magic. I am transported. All my experiences and knowledge of the linden resonate, echo in my brain, and coalesce into an ur-experience of linden until I feel – I know – the linden in all its leafy, barky, blossomy linden-ness.”

Like the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, she explores the poetics of space, not only in domestic scenes, but also in the examining rooms of hospital and history. Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset offers his own picture of “a few drops of phenomenology” that apply to the essays in Marrow Memory: he examines a patient by comparing the perspectives of doctors and nurses, as opposed to family members. In practicing narrative medicine, Nowaczyk listens to both ends of her stethoscope: “I was reading to learn about patients’ experiences. I wanted to know how it felt to be on the other end of the stethoscope.”

Nowaczyk attentively scopes time and space, from her childhood in Poland to “Reading Dostoyevsky in New York City.” Her “Preface” probes “the skin of existence,” a feminist intersection of the personal and political. She palpates various organs toward bone marrow, and her prose pulsates with the rhythms of an engaging mind. Her opening essay, “You, In Translation,” begins with an epigraph from Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces: “The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications.” On her self-examining table, the physician identifies mysterious implications of immigration, and heals herself and society. By addressing herself in the second person, she provides the necessary distance for scrutiny: “You list your family’s needs for the first week in Toronto” and “You instruct your new classmates and teachers how to pronounce your Polish name.”

The bilingual essayist visits Poland with her two young sons in “Marrow Memory”: “Jake and Luke wade through the tangled shrubs, careful not to tread on the sunken graves of the Old Brusno cemetery.” Anne Michaels’ translator is tangled in these shrubs and sunken graves. The doctor’s stethoscope listens to earth’s remembering: “A world secreted in the deep shadows of an old-growth beech forest in the southeastern corner of Poland.” Immersed in ancestral genealogy, the mother recalls her own childhood and meshes with Michaels, for these innocent trees reveal their storied guilt: “I had learned about the slaughter of Jews that had taken place among these trees – stripped naked, forced to dig their own graves, they were shot as they stood next to the holes in the ground – and about the cattle cars that had carried them to the Belzec gas chambers, thirty kilometers north of this cemetery.” Her stethoscope stretches across these kilometers, inducing a fear of forests and marrow memory.

From that darkness relieved by her son’s enjoyment of his ancestral home, she turns to “Matisse, the Sea and Me” – art, nature, and self. From fear of the forest to love of the sea, her stethoscope catches the marine pulse: “I can sit for hours watching waves pulsate on the beach.” The ripple effect reaches the phenomenologist: “The whisper of the waves induces a calm that eludes me in the city …. It is the combination of the sound and of the scent of the briny sea water … and the breeze that brings those scents into my olfactory bulbs to resonate in my limbic system, in the deep emotional pathways of the brain.” Nowaczyk works at the edges of the limbic system to get to the core of experience – whether in Matisse’s brilliant colours or in her own marine dive: “I found an empty conch shell the size of a football. Its thick, wide, salmon-tinted lip, rough on the outside and smooth and glassy when it coiled into an internal staircase, invited my imagination to roam again.” A stethoscope listens to the labyrinthine sounds of curled ear and conch shell at a point where alembic and limbic meet. Or, in Bachelard’s terms, seashells and waves murmur sonorously and silently.

Matisse’s sea applies to the next essay, “Ad Infinitum,” which repeats “once” in its own rhythm and echo, as Nowaczyk shuttles between hospital and home, exposing her own vulnerability: “Once, as an intern, I pronounced four people dead in 24 hours; by four o’clock in the morning, I was ready to go home to my husband of sixteen months, but I had to stay until the morning report.” This four times six multiplies to 24, even as once dilates to many, and the essay ends in hypnotic punctuation of exhaustion from a demanding routine: “Once …. Once …. Once.” The doctor pronounces life and death, Polish and English, in her anatomy of creativity and memory.

“Laundry DNA” scopes domestic genetics through the pandemic. Over the phone (another stethoscopic experience) daughter asks her mother how to prepare krochmal, a starch solution for stiffening cotton and linen bedsheets. At the ironing board she remembers her grandmother in the rhyme of laundry, memory, discovery, essay, and DNA: “These sensations seem to be embedded deep, deep inside my marrow, transferred through generations, and all I can do is hope that my sons will remember those sweet-smelling sheets I have ironed for them.”

Like “Laundry DNA,” “Dyed in the Hair” presents history and histology in strands of personal and professional information surrounding hair follicles. “During the fifth week of pregnancy, as the forming fetus swims in its ocean of amniotic fluid, a sheet of epidermal cells beneath her skin thickens and dives deep into the subcutaneous tissues.” This description soon gives birth to the author’s experience with grey hair caused by her immigration and poor nutrition. The essay begins with some Polish folk wisdom: “If you pluck a grey hair, ten others will grow in its place,” and ends with Nowaczyk’s personal colouring: “In a decade or so, I might try going grey again. Or I’ll dye it plum streaked with carrot.”

From the colours of her hair and Matisse’s canvasses she turns to malformed foetuses and infants in her genetic practice, identifying abnormalities in DNA sequences. “Almost Perfect” examines chromosomal mutations in historic and contemporary examples. “The short, pert chromosome 15 unfurls itself, and shakes out its folds and kinks. It and its forty-five cohorts are getting ready for their big time: ensuring survival of their genes for another thirty years or so.” After this almost perfect math of 15, 30, 45, she ventures on a genetic journey through generations after the Roman Empire when “one particular DNA polymerase trips, stutters, and spits out a four-nucleotide sequence twice.” She traces that stuttering trip across Europe: “By now she and her Jewish brethren have reached the Rhineland on their northward migration from the foothills of the Alps.” The sperm’s mutation and generational migration find their way to the author’s examining table where she has to inform non-Jewish parents about the presence of Tay-Sachs in their daughter. “It never gets easier, it doesn’t stop hurting, and I have to do it again.”

Marrow Memory balances the personal and professional – Nowaczyk’s Polish past filled with teenage desire, and her present expertise specializing in pediatric genetics. Her empathy towards her patients is evident throughout, and her concluding words attest to that: “’Hi, I’m Dr. Nowaczyk,’ I said to the middle-aged woman sitting on the examining table. ‘It’s so nice to meet you’.” It is an equal pleasure to read her engaging and memorable essays of discovery.

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About the Author

Born in Poland, Margaret Nowaczyk is a pediatric clinical geneticist and a professor at McMaster University and DeGroote School of Medicine. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Canadian, Polish and American literary magazines and anthologies. She lives in Hamilton, ON, with her husband and two sons.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ James Street North Books (Wolsak & Wynn, June 18 2024)

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Paperback ‏ : ‎186 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1989496903

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1989496909

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.