Nothing beats a great read

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

One of the beauties of reading is that you never know exactly what to expect when you open the cover. The fiction reviewed for this Chanukah issue of the Independent held some anticipated pleasures but also a couple of surprises. Let’s start with those.

My Mother’s Secret: A Novel Based on a True Holocaust Story by J.L. Witterick (Putnam, 2013) is prose at its best. Inspired by the real-life efforts of Poles Franciszka Halamajowa and her daughter, Helena, to hide Jews during the Holocaust, Witterick has written a beautiful, poetic novel that, with an economy of language, makes it a one-sitting read. It tells a fictionalized version of the story from four different perspectives: Helena, whose narratives bookend the novel; Bronek, who is hidden with his family (those that survive) in the pig shed; Mikolaj, who is hidden with his father (a doctor) and mother in a cellar beneath the kitchen; and Vilheim, a Nazi soldier who runs away from the army.

Righteous Among the Nations, Halamajowa and her daughter saved 15 Jews, and lost their son/brother, who was killed taking supplies to Jewish partisans. As the epilogue explains, “Before the war, there 6,000 Jews in Sokal, Poland. Only 30 survived the war and half of those because of one Polish woman, Franciszka.” My Mother’s Secret is a worthy tribute.

The other surprise was Moryak: A Novel of the Russian Revolution by Lee Mandel (Glagoslav Publications Ltd., 2013). It has the look and feel of a self-published book, an aggressive red cover and a large, unappealing font. However, Mandel – a doctor in the U.S. navy and a published historian – has written an intriguing tale, with complex characters, narrative-supporting historical facts and lots of action to boot. It starts in Russia, in 1905, where a plot to assassinate Czar Nicholas II has been revised – but without the knowledge of the two men chosen for the top-secret mission: American Lieut. Stephen Morrison and British agent Sidney Reilly. The story centres around Morrison and how he – Lev Kambotchnik, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants – becomes the one chosen for the mission by President Theodore Roosevelt; his imprisonment when the plan goes awry; and how he becomes a leader, under an assumed name, in the Russian Revolution. Leaving aside some awkward dialogue and hyperbole, especially near the end about Morrison’s stalwart character, Moryak is a fun, well-constructed adventure.

Another whirlwind adventure is Fugitive Colors by Lisa Barr (GIRLilla Warfare Press, 2012). When we meet Yakov Klein, he has just pocketed a book on Gustav Klimt from the library. He has been stealing art books since the week after his bar mitzvah, nine months earlier. While he is supposed to be studying Torah, his whole being needs to paint. The next chapter jumps to 1932, and Julian Klein is stepping off the train at Gare de Lyon in Paris, planning to enter Ecole des Beaux-Arts. At a café, however, he encounters three young artists – the handsome, talented René, the rich, wanna-be-painter Felix and the somewhat-talented Adrienne, René’s girlfriend at the time – who persuade him to study with their teacher instead. The four become fast friends, though jealousy and rivalry (in love and art) make for tempestuous relationships, and the Nazi rise adds to the danger for everyone, but especially, in the context of this novel, to artists and any artwork that does not conform to Nazi edicts of taste, i.e. is considered “degenerate.”

There are many plot twists in Fugitive Colors that will keep readers guessing as to who will survive and what will happen. There is also generally strong writing, though the dialogue doesn’t always ring true and it is hard to understand Julian’s unwavering and self-destructive loyalty both to art and René. However, many scenes are incredibly vivid and heart-rending, such as Yakov’s wordless leave-taking from his mother, who suffered his father’s blows for keeping her only son’s artwork a secret, and the scene in which the true extent of Felix’s jealousy for René’s talent is demonstrated by a tantrum that ends with Felix violently shredding one of René’s paintings with a stylus. Such moments propel the novel, and its subject matter makes it more than just an escape read.

Also more than an escape, and less harrowing, is The Gallery of Vanished Husbands by Natasha Solomons (Sceptre, 2013). The idea for the main character came from Solomons’ husband’s grandmother, Rosie, who lived in Gorbals, Scotland. Rosie was abandoned by her husband in 1948, with two young children and no money – never having been granted a divorce, she was an agunah, chained woman, until he died. She defied convention and started a hair salon, managing to have her son be the first in the family to go to university. Rosie died after Solomons’ husband’s bar mitzvah, so Solomons never met Rosie, but, she writes, “the stories itched away at me, and I decided to write about a woman inspired by her. Juliet Montague is a fictional creation, but I hope she possesses a dash of Rosie Solomons.”

Whether or not that’s the case cannot be known, but the character of Juliet is certainly a firebrand. She tries to not jeopardize her or her parents’ standing in their small English town’s conservative Jewish community, but, on a trip to London to buy a refrigerator for her 30th birthday, Juliet ends up spending her savings on a portrait of herself. She, her two children’s and her parents’ lives will never be the same.

Each chapter is headed by a “Catalogue Item,” as in an auction, which describes the portrait for sale. It begins with “Woman with a Bowl of Apples” (aka “The Fridge”), by Charlie Fussell, painted in 1958. Charlie is the artist who does that life-changing portrait, but he’s not the last one to paint Juliet, as she becomes enmeshed in the art scene, forms a (scandalous) relationship with a reclusive artist, travels at her parents’ behest to California with her two children to try and find her recalcitrant husband, and more. It is a story of self-discovery, of family, of friendship, of creativity and of what comprises art in the personal and public spheres. The Gallery of Vanished Husbands delivers exactly what it promises.

A commendable effort to do the same falls short with the recently self-published Murder Over the Border by Richard Steinitz. His first novel has many interesting elements, but a gripping mystery it is not.

It starts out promisingly, with the main character, Yossi Abulafia, a policeman doing his reserve duty near the Jordanian border. A nature lover, he has been documenting the lives of the antelope in the area, camera in hand. While taking photographs of the animals, he happens to take one of what looks like a murder taking place across the border. He accidentally falls off the embankment and is seriously injured, however, which delays his discovery of the photo.

When he does finally develop the film, Yossi, now assigned to a desk job, begins to investigate or, more accurately, asks his friends/contacts to look into the matter, the nature of which he keeps to himself. Meanwhile, during a conference to Amsterdam, he meets a Jordanian policeman, who he saves from a drive-by shooting. For unconvincing reasons, neither man reports the incident and, some 20 pages later, both men are shot at again, and both are wounded. The next part begins two years after the attack, with Yossi now out of the police force, but offered a job as an assistant to his friend Yehiel, a special advisor to the prime minister. This brings Yossi into the Oslo Accord process and there are some interesting sections on how such diplomatic efforts are conducted.

The mystery gets lost in everything else that’s going on in Murder Over the Border, and Steinitz allows the narrative to get bogged down several times with an inordinate amount of detail, from how a photo is developed to faxing a document to three-and-a-half pages about Yossi’s first shooting-range session after the Amsterdam attack, for example.

Steinitz’s bio states that, having lived in Israel since 1968, he is a “veteran of more than 20 years’ service in the Israeli army (reserves)” and, as such, “he was often disappointed by the absence of accurately written books that deal with the Israel-Arab conflict. Many works of fiction claim to give a true picture of the area and the events, yet contain glaring errors of fact and even simple translation mistakes! These were among the reasons he wrote Murder Over the Border.” This is a great reason to write a book, and if the book’s description had highlighted the Olso sections and downplayed the mystery aspects, readers’ expectations would be different and the story closer to meeting them.

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