THE TINKER'S SON

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.