A tragic, lovely, and important Yiddish novel in translation.
Maze’s posthumous novel presents the beauty, poverty, and tragedy of Belarus during the First Russian Revolution as seen through the eyes of a young Jewish girl.
Dineh was born in an impoverished region in Russia, now known as Belarus, and her family is one of only two Jewish households among many peasant families in the village of Ugli, although they have contact with Jewish families in surrounding communities. Her father, Sholem, owns an orchard and works the land, and he sells liquor from his cellar to tavern owners in nearby villages. With his wife, Peshe, he has five other children in addition to Dineh, and struggle is an everyday part of their lives. To make matters worse, the czar commands Sholem and other Jewish people to sell their land, either to the government or to people of the Russian Orthodox faith; two of Dineh’s siblings openly speak of socialism as revolution looms. Dineh’s wishes are simpler: to get an education like her brothers’ and to learn the Psalms, study the Talmud, and be able to read, write, tell stories, and recite prayers with the same lyricism as her father. However, Dineh’s fierce attachment to her home is ill-suited for a time of violent social change, and she’s forced to immigrate to America. This novel by Maze, who died in 1962, was posthumously edited by her confidant Shaffir and is skillfully translated from Yiddish by Taub. Its prose manages to be beautiful and biting yet straightforwardly plain at the same time: “impoverished Russian peasantry were rich in lyricism….They would pawn the last shirt in their closet and sing out and cry out their bitter fate.” The book is often digressive; for example, the narration tells of the many tragedies that cause a woman to cry herself blind and of the heartbreaking events that befall Dineh’s brother; however, these tangents don’t take away from the reading experience; on the contrary, they only sharpen the picture of the bygone era. (The novel’s table of contents promises translator notes and an appendix that were not available for review.)
A tragic, lovely, and important Yiddish novel in translation.Pub Date: April 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-7343872-9-2
Page Count: 269
Publisher: White Goat Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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