Lacking the humor of the original musical, Silber’s adaptation is disappointing.
The iconic characters from Fiddler on the Roof are brought back to life in a new novel that continues their story.
It’s tempting to imagine the lives of our favorite fictional characters extending beyond the margins of their stories. Just see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for proof. In her first novel, Silber, a singer and actress who has performed many times in Fiddler on the Roof, continues the stories of two of the characters from that iconic musical: Hodel, Tevye’s second-oldest daughter, and the radical socialist Perchik, who tutored Tevye’s younger children. At the end of the musical, Perchik has been exiled to Siberia, and Hodel is leaving home to join him there. Silber picks up the narrative at this point. In her telling, Hodel is picked up and imprisoned on her way to Perchik. She’s held for a year or more in a dingy, solitary cell, where she is starved and raped. Eventually she reaches Siberia, marries Perchik, and they begin to build a life together. Unfortunately, Silber relates all this in rather florid prose, turning the humorous musical into an overheated, humorless romance. The gentle mockery with which Perchik is treated onstage is entirely absent here. He has become a serious, even tragic figure. He’s not entirely convincing, either, despite (or perhaps because of) the back story Silber has given him. Worse, Silber works in flashbacks, so while we do see Hodel and Perchik in their new present, we also have to revisit terrain already traveled by the musical. Much as we might have liked to, we don’t get to see what’s become of the rest of Hodel’s family.
Lacking the humor of the original musical, Silber’s adaptation is disappointing.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-434-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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