A spirited novel of obligation and ethics in a time of brutality.
In Horvitz’s historical novel, a would-be rabbi finds himself on the front lines of the Russo–Turkish War.
All the Jews of Navahrudak know and fear the conscription officer, who delivers the news whenever some young man has been drafted into the Russian Imperial Army. (He’s so unpopular that he works at night, affixing his notices to people’s doors.) When a letter arrives instructing Yakov Leibovich to report for a barracks assignment, his tinker father—a conscripted veteran of the Crimean War—flies into a rage. “You will be cannon fodder, Yakov!” he cries. “Is that what you want to be? Do you want to die in a frozen trench so the Tsar can beat his chest and draw bigger maps of the Russian Empire?” The 20-year-old rabbinical student—whose primary interests are the Torah and fantasizing about the buxom Rivkah Eizenberg, who gathers scraps in the market square—agrees that dying in a frozen trench is not at all what he wants. The intervention of a rabbi secures Yakov a job with a private military supply firm—but only on the condition that Yakov find another Jew to fight in his place. Yakov reluctantly fingers a squatter who lives on the edge of town, a man who seems to have no family. Only after the man is taken away does Yakov learn that he’s a long-lost childhood friend: Avram Eizenberg, brother of Rivkah. Consumed by guilt (“At times, my mind conjures images of a hurt and tearful young woman cursing me, closing her hands into fists, and beating my chest for what I have done to her brother”), Yakov heads to Odessa to begin his work as an army supplier, resolved to find Avram and make sure that he comes to no harm. Yakov succeeds in locating his old friend, but Russia soon declares war on the Ottomans. Will Yakov ever find a way to make amends to Rivkah, or is he destined to follow his friend to a loveless early grave?
Horvitz’s prose, as narrated by Yakov, is spirited and philosophical, as befits a young man who finds himself caught between contemplation of God and a life of action. “At times, I feel the pull of cosmopolitan ideas that I know are inconsistent with the serious spiritual life that my learned rabbi requires,” laments Yakov. “But I cannot help myself. I have an insistent urge to know everything about everything.” The novel’s arc evokes the books of the period in which it is set; the story hinges on a moral failure and its long aftermath. There’s something timeless about Yakov’s journey, one that has the simplicity of a folktale and the weight of a vast Russian saga. Even so, the book takes itself slightly more seriously than readers might wish. A general lack of humor, as well as the rather sentimental treatment of some of the characters, lends the novel a slightly melodramatic quality. That said, readers of historical fiction who have a particular interest in the Pale of Settlement or Imperial Russia will undoubtedly enjoy Horvitz’s rich evocation of the era.
Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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