YOUR MOUTH IS LOVELY

Canadian novelist Richler (Throw Away Angels, not reviewed) fashions a tale of lyric historical suspense out of a Jewish girl’s life—from her stunted beginnings in a late-19th-century Belarussian village to her political arrest during the 1905 Russian Revolution.

From a harsh Siberian prison, in 1911, teenaged Miriam relates in flashback the sad story leading to her incarceration for life. Born in the dirt-poor shtetl on the swampy Pripet River, Miriam is doubly cursed: her mother walks into the sea after giving birth to her; and her forbidding stepmother, Tsila, leaves a death scar on her neck from slicing her trachea open when she suffers diphtheria as a child. (“Your mouth is lovely,” Tsila tells the child, teaching her to speak.) Miriam grows up under the sour, morbid teachings of Tsila, who scorns the town’s gossips and dreams of a better life outside of Russia. Pogroms descend on defenseless Jewish villages, and insurrection is in the air: by degrees, Miriam is drawn into secret political meetings and running errands for agitators. Sent to Kiev to find her aunt Bayla, who has run off with her suspect fiancé, Leib, Miriam suffers her first imprisonment for dropping pamphlets over the balcony at the opera; soon, thanks to Bayla’s lax supervision, she becomes a member of the Socialist movement. Although well educated and deeply committed, Miriam is young and falls sway to more forceful personalities, like Leib, who seduces her irresponsibly; as a result, her final imprisonment feels arbitrary and unreal. Richler has done admirable research (she lists reams of sources in the back); her novel’s strength lies in the quietly assured detail of Miriam’s peasant family beginnings. The revolutionaries, inevitably, spout rather uninteresting slogans, and the ending rushes to a neat conclusion.

The rare woman revolutionary has her day in a story written with tremendous conviction and feeling.