On the night Annette Libeskind Berkovits’s father lay dying, her son accidentally knocked over a nightstand in the dark. Four delicate Murano glass birds, a pair of doves and a pair of purple martins, fell to the floor and shattered.
Annette tried to put them back together, but the damage was beyond repair. She normally had little patience for broken things, yet something stopped her from throwing these away. She gathered the pieces, placed them in her curio cabinet, and left them there.
For years, she couldn’t explain why she’d kept them. It wasn’t until she began writing her sixth book, The Great Conjunction, published by Munn Avenue Press, that she started to understand.
Annette, now 83, joined host, Charles Levin, on The Munn Avenue Muse to talk about the book, her family’s unusual relationship with memory, and how a few broken glass birds helped inspire a novel about the things we collect and the stories they carry.
What if our possessions are part of who we are?
Most of us have things we can’t bring ourselves to throw away. An old photograph, a chipped plate, a piece of jewelry that belonged to someone we loved. We may have forgotten how we acquired them, but the thought of getting rid of them makes us uncomfortable.
In the author’s note to The Great Conjunction, Annette asks:
“We’re supposed to declutter, downsize, make it easy for those who come after us. But what if the things we have collected over a lifetime are not clutter? What if they’re evidence? What if they are in a sense us?”
Annette comes from a family deeply concerned with preserving memory. Her brother, Daniel Libeskind, is the internationally known architect whose work includes the Jewish Museum Berlin and the master plan for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site.
“If you had to define my family by a single characteristic, it’s concerned with memory,” she says.
It makes us think about what happens when someone dies, and the family is left to sort through a lifetime of belongings. We know what these things meant to the person who owned them, or at least we think we do. But will anyone else understand why they were kept?
Annette takes that question into some unusual territory in her novel.
When objects have stories of their own
The Great Conjunction uses magical realism, a style of fiction in which strange or impossible things happen, yet the characters accept them as part of ordinary life. Objects can have personalities. Birds can talk. The author doesn’t stop to explain how any of it is possible.
During the conversation, Charlie compared magical realism to Impressionism in painting. An Impressionist artist can change the way we see a familiar scene by playing with light, color, and form. The result may be less photographically accurate, but sometimes it communicates the feeling of a place better than a realistic painting could.
Magical realism can do something similar for fiction.
For Annette, it gave her a way to write about grief, loneliness, and the isolation of the pandemic. By allowing objects to take on lives of their own, she could examine our attachment to possessions and the memories we store in them.
And those broken Murano birds, which she’d kept all those years without understanding why, finally found a place in her writing.
Two women on opposite sides of New York
At the center of The Great Conjunction are Bunny, an upper-middle-class New Yorker, and Fiona, a woman experiencing homelessness. Their lives unfold against the backdrop of the COVID-19 lockdown, when New York became an eerily quiet city.
Annette recalled how the pandemic changed what people noticed. Those who could afford to stay home found themselves surrounded by their possessions, spending far more time than usual inside their own four walls.
Meanwhile, grocery clerks, delivery workers, sanitation crews, and other essential workers kept the city functioning. Many were poorly paid and had little choice about exposing themselves to the virus.
The contrast stayed with Annette. Through Bunny and Fiona, she explores how 2 women living in the same city can experience entirely different worlds.
Their relationship also gives the story room to examine assumptions about wealth, security, and what people need to feel that they belong.
An unlikely meeting in the night sky
The novel’s title comes from an astronomical event that occurred on December 21, 2020, when Jupiter and Saturn appeared unusually close together in the evening sky.
The event, known as the Great Conjunction, was especially remarkable because the planets hadn’t appeared so close together in the night sky for nearly 800 years.
For Annette, the timing offered a wonderful premise for a novel written during the pandemic. Here were 2 planets coming together at a time when people on Earth were being told to stay apart.
She wanted the astronomy to be accurate, so she consulted her nephew, an astrophysicist, to help her understand the science. She also researched the history and manufacture of the porcelain figures, antiques, and other collectibles that appear in the book.
Did writing the book change her?
One of the things that is especially interesting was how writing The Great Conjunction affected Annette’s feelings about her own collections.
After spending so much time considering why people hold on to objects, she discovered that she’d become more willing to let some of hers go.
“I started giving [my collections] less importance than I thought previously,” she told me. “I’ve become less attached to them. And I didn’t think that was possible.”
That was surprising. After all, she’d written an entire novel inspired in part by the power of possessions to preserve our memories.
It’s also one of the pleasures of writing fiction. You begin with an idea, follow it wherever it takes you, and sometimes discover that you’ve changed your mind along the way.
For Annette, the journey began with 4 broken glass birds that she couldn’t bear to throw away. Years later, they helped her make sense of something she’d carried with her since the night her father died.
I suspect many of us have an object like that somewhere in our homes. Perhaps there’s a story waiting to be told about it.
🎧 Listen to the full episode of The Munn Avenue Muse Featuring Annette Libeskind Berkovitz on your favorite podcast platform.
📘 The Great Conjunction is available now at:
🌐 Connect with Annette through her official website.
📖 The Great Conjunction by Annette Libeskind Berkovits is available in eBook, paperback, and hardcover through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org.
✍️ If you’re working on a book of your own, whether fiction, memoir, or nonfiction, Munn Avenue Press can help you shape your manuscript and bring it to readers. Visit MunnAvenuePress.com to learn more.
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Happy Writing,
Charles Levin, Publisher & Founder
What’s the one object in your home that you could never part with? Drop your thoughts in the comments below!
