Abstract

Twenty-year-old Crystal Levinson, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, is searching for her Father; her paternal father, but also the figurative Father, God. When Crystal was a child, her mother was a practicing Jew, while her father, who later abandoned her family, denied God. Having been caught in the middle of extremes, Crystal grows up haunted by a sense of absence. As Crystal searches for her missing father she also searches for her lost faith, and does so by narrating her connection to the divine through the symbol of water. To Crystal, the meaning of water fluctuates between God, nature, life, memory, history, heritage, faith, art, love, intimacy, connection and creation, all of which she glimpses through personal relationships and by sculpting. Crystal’s narrative draws upon religious symbolism while borrowing from spiritualist nature writing such as Barry Lopez’s "Desert Notes" and Annie Dillard’s "Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek." Elizabeth Smart’s "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept" and Virginia Woolf’s "The Waves" are strong influences due to the interiority and lyricism of their narratives, and their investigations into the connection between intimacy and spirituality.