ODESSA

A young woman and her family reckon with the aftermath—physical, emotional, and magical—of a violent pogrom.

In the Russian Pale of Settlement, in the year 1905, Cossacks march through Yetta’s shtetl, murdering and pillaging, with shouts of “Jews will not replace us.” At first, Yetta hides with her mother, Frieda, and her baby brother, Ephraim, but when she fears for her father Mordechai’s life, she throws herself into the melee with devastating consequences. Desperate to save his daughter, Mordechai enacts a kabbalistic ritual without entirely understanding its repercussions. The story becomes a golem/dybbuk two-for-one, utilizing these stalwarts of Jewish folklore to explore a young woman’s battle for agency and self-love in the aftermath of sexual violence. While the ideas here are promising, the delivery leaves something to be desired: In her eagerness to ensure readers are picking up what she’s putting down, Sher beats the proverbial horse to death, and then beats its dybbuk, too. Yetta’s voice—whether it issues from a living girl, a dybbuk, or a golem—always sounds the same, diluting the novel’s atmospheric project. The prose is able enough but never bewitches as it means to, as attempts to stay in a folkloric, period-accurate register result in anemic, stilted sentences. The language is lightly peppered with italicized, transliterated Yiddish and Hebrew, with Yetta somewhat anachronistically referring to her parents by the Hebrew “Ima” and “Abba” rather than the Yiddish “Mame” and “Tate.” The third-person point of view cycles among Frieda, Mordechai, and the various Yettas, and their conflicting perspectives support the story’s tension. The plot picks up speed early on and dutifully keeps chugging. Nevertheless, the pages turn slowly.

Read it for an inventive feminist entry to Jewish mystical fiction, but don’t expect any miracles.