Girl Unwrapped

by Gabriella Goliger

A remarkable Jewish coming-of-age novel about the imperfections of history, both personal and political.

Genres: Fiction, Jewish, Queer, Lesbian, Canada, LGBT, Religion

336 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 10, 2010

Reviews

[Ronald Fischman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am almost as old as Gabriella Goliger. This may, in fact, be a disadvantage in reading and enjoying Girl, Unwrapped by Ms. Goliger, a long-term Canadian whose first novel has erupted on the world after fifty years of practice. I am no stranger to memoir; my first novel is about 50% memoir. Neighter am I a stranger to Montreal, having hiked (and I use the term with full knowledge) the elevation from McGill up to the top of the mountain on which Toni Goldblatt, Goliger’s lead, spends her earliest years. The coming-of-age story of young Ms. Goldblatt seems as vital as the stories I hear from the college girls in my creative writing classes. The advantage that Goliger shares with us is the distance – a good thirty years – that brings with it the wisdom to choose just those moments that made Toni who she became.

Born to Holocaust survivors, Toni’s life goes off the greased rails of her parents’ expectations in the primary grades, when her mother brings home one pouffy, girly textile monstrosity after another. Young Toni, the epitome of tomboy, is as horrified by these creations as her mother is with the scruffy, dirty jeans and tops that she favors. Toni’s body further trumps her mother’s expectations, growing tall and rail-thin, like her father. Her expulsion from summer camp after her drunken pledge of eternal devotion and love for the music teacher, a woman, cement her status as a lost child for her poor mother. I almost feel sorry for Toni’s mom – almost.

This is how Goliger shines. I feel the spirit of the androgynous child. I feel the passion of her desperate crush on the music teacher, incredibly hot and barely old enough to be called a woman. I feel the need to connect, in Zionism, with an idea greater than oneself. I see the women, young and old, of Toni’s life through her emerging lesbian eyes, not my own. There is only one beef I have with this excellent memoir. Goliger is of the “Hope-I-Die-Before-I-Get-Old” generation. It shows. Her protagonist lives 35% of this book as a child, and another 35% meeting her first crush and chasing her all the way to Israel. That leaves thirty percent of the book. I say that Goliger tried too hard to work Toni’s identity as a young adult lesbian in here, as if there wouldn’t be another book. Or could it be that the juice of Toni’s life is sucked dry by the time she is only 25? As “Girl, Unwrapped,” Toni is pretty well unwrapped and exposed by the time she ends her girlhood. As deeply as I bonded with Ms. Goliger’s character through her exodus from girlhood, I would have gladly read a sequel that revealed how this coming of age tale formed the young woman that I would have loved to come to know.

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.

You know how sometimes the character(s) in a book become like friends, and you find you don't want to finish the book because it means saying goodbye to them? So the book you couldn't put down you now ration and read slower, savoring each chapter?

That's why it took me so long to finish this book that I've been almost done with for a week now.

Wow.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was such a special treat for me to read. I believe it was the first book I have read that wrote about my era and my world growing up: Montreal and the world in the 50’s 60’s and 1970. It included several iconic places I am more than familiar with: The Jewish General Hospital on St. Catherine’s street ( around the corner from the house I grew up in), the Jewish Y where I spent endless hours training on the swim team, Northmount High School, my high school, and McGill and the student ghetto where I went to school and lived. I could wander streets of our neighborhood and the downtown streets of St. Catherine, Peel and ‘Main” right along with the protagonist Toni. I would buy the Montreal star for 5 cents and we would read the Gazette. And in those papers we read about Egypt. The war with Nasaar. The defining moments of that time.
I grew up unfamiliar with gay bars such as LouLous or indeed any of those aspects of the gay culture until I went to McGill for that was part of the era: among the things you DID NOT DISCUSS. Those also included the Holocaust and the Hungarian Revolution. ( Many of the Northmount students had immigrated from Hungary in 1956).
Indeed, among my graduating class and my home room class at Northmount were three women who are gay: Gabriella Goliger was one of them.
It is interesting to me that she does not consider the novel as autobiographical. There are many ways in which Toni is very diifferent from the Gabriella I remember but there are many ways in which they are one and the same: especially her desire to be a serious student and win awards that people in the Montreal Star would read about. Indeed Gabriella won the Steinberg scholarship.
Again, such a treat for me. Thank you Gabriella for bringing your world alive. It must have brought up some very painful memories. One wishes that times would have been different so the women in our class, and others, could have talked about what they were going through rather than be forced to hide in the shadows.This is such a tender novel. I highly recommend it.

[Frau Ott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Toni is a young Jewish holocaust survivor who has moved with her parents to Canada. She is a tom boy and struggles to find friends and deciding how she sees herself. After attending a Jewish camp, she moves to Israel to help in the war in the sixties, taking a gap before entering the university. While in Israel, her father dies of a heart attack and she returns home. She comes out to her mother again, having done so when she returned from camp. Her parents were not accepting of this. In the end she moves into her own apartment where she re-establishes a better relationship with her mother. I wish she had continued the story so I could feel she grows and finds friends and a career. I felt left up in the air for a conclusion.

[Rosamund · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was kind of slow and I never really warmed up to Toni as a protagonist, maybe because it was all told in the third person. A lot of stuff happens in this book, a lot of political change (also found it interesting how there was only a subtle allusion to the Quiet Revolution, given the setting!). But sometimes it felt like Toni wasn't so much an actual character as a vehicle to reflect the zeitgeist. I really enjoyed Part V, though; the right amount of tension and resolution, and just generally conveying the feeling of being a young person with a hopeful future in an exciting city ahead of them.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the idea of this book, but it felt boring. I suppose that's the danger of a story in which someone doesn't find anywhere she fits in until college - no romance or even real friendship - but it should've been possible to give the story some more plot.

[Jaime · Rating 5 out of 5]

In these pages I was lost and found a home

This broke and reformed my gay, Jewish misfit soul on almost every other page. Thank you for putting this magical gift, this mirror and yet entirely unique story into the world. Stunning, beautiful prose I never wanted to finish it.

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this coming of age story of a young queer Jewish woman. I loved also the exploration of her family's internalized survivor's guilt post-Holocaust.

[Skylar · Rating 4 out of 5]

pretty good although the beginning was slow

[Nairne Holtz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Girl Unwrapped is a bildungsroman about a gay Jewish girl growing up in Montreal in the 1960s. The book is organized into four parts with each being a place that forms the identity of the heroine, Toni Goldblatt. We first meet Toni as a tomboy on the cusp of adolescence. Her parents have fled the DP camps of Europe for a Montreal immigrant neighbourhood where Toni runs around with a tough gang of boys. The neighbourhood with its alleyways, trees, rocks, and bogs is paradise for Toni, but her cultured Austrian parents have higher aspirations. In addition, her male chums are beginning to see her as a girl to be dominated, rather than one of them, thus ending her place among them. The novel shifts to a Jewish camp in the Laurentians where Toni, now a teenager, falls in love with another girl. Things go very badly, and when Toni is thrown out of the camp for being a lesbian, her mother insists her daughter can’t be a lesbian because lesbians are cruel, depraved sadists. “The Nazis selected them to be guards in the camps because they could be counted on to act like beasts.” Toni, whose beloved father has never recovered from World War II, resolves to be ‘good.’ She obtains perfect grades and heads to Jerusalem to learn Hebrew—and stalk the woman she fell in love with at camp, now an up-and-coming Israeli folk singer. Amidst a Zionist hippie scene, Toni discovers neither the girl nor the State of Israel belong on the pedestal on which she has put them, and heads back to Montreal. Amidst Montreal’s lesbian bars, campus life, and a burgeoning women’s lib movement, she finds both a place for herself and a place within her family. This is an excellent book which deserved much more attention than it received.

[Deborah Gorham · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Girl Unwrapped. Here are some brief comments.
This is a beautifully written coming-of-age story. Goliger’s Toni, whom we meet when she is eight, must learn to confront both her own Lesbianism and the haunting Holocaust memories of her survivor parents. At the end of the novel, Toni is a young university student who has achieved a convincing understanding of herself and of her parents. Goliger’s narrative is compelling and sensitive, witty and moving. Toni is a complex and loveable character. Readers will not soon forget her.

Deborah Gorham
Ottawa, Ontario

[Mary Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This coming-of-age/coming-out narrative set in Montreal and Israel takes a while to get going, but by the end it's riveting, w/ descriptions of the Montreal femme/butch bar scene in the 60s. Only child Toni struggles to realise her lesbian identity under the pressures put on her by her Holocaust survivor parents, enduring Jewish summer camp, among other trials. Her relationship w/ her parents, esp. her father, is achingly portrayed.

[Arsenal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading Gabriella's new novel, Girl Unwrapped. She captures the voice perfectly of a young Toni as she goes through life trying to figure it all out, as we all do. Toni's parents our Holocaust survivors, they working middle-class, and there are secrets. Toni has secrets of her own too and that makes life even a little more complicated. Well done, a nice story.

[Nagaisgich · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the character of Toni. She was likeable and I share a lot in common with her, especially her era.

One star each for character development and portrayal of the relationships she had with her parents.

Two stars missing becuase I reserve them for depth and exploration of the theme which I felt was not there.

[Asher · Rating 4 out of 5]

The coming out story of a young girl, Toni, who realizes quite young that there is something different about her. She is the child of two holocaust survivors, growing up in the 60s. A compelling glimpse into the life of lesbians when things were quite different.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Three stars because the plot of this book fit well with what I like to read about. Reasonably well-written. Terrible title and cover (Arsenal Pulp Press, what were you thinking?).

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book, although occasionally I found the prose a bit off-putting. The author really captured what it was like to grow up different in the 60's and 70's.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really great coming of age story. It was an ever better read for me because I recognized a ton of the places main character Toni went to from my time living in Montreal. Two thumbs up for sure.

[Rae · Rating 2 out of 5]

A good coming of age story but couldn´t help but to struggle with remaining interested in the story and was left feeling dissatisfied with the ending.