impossible,
and where the people gossip freely, but also show great concern for each
other. The village is situated in Poland, and the people are caught up in
the seemingly endless political changes at the end of the 19th century.
Four women who were "vilda hayas" (wild animals) as girls are at the centre of the story. Hanna-Lea is now the childless wife of Hershel the butcher, and we see the pain of her barrenness finally alleviated through a change in her husband's thinking. Faygela dreamt of being a teacher but has become the mother of five children instead. The false arrest of her oldest daughter for "radical" political acts is one of the main points of the story. Zia-Sara has emigrated to America with her Torah-studying husband. Both die tragically in a factory fire and their two children are left adrift between America's socialist culture and the tiny village's traditions. And Misha the midwife, (who has "more life in her than the whole of Russian Poland"), refusing to be bound by propriety or tradition, divorces her husband for no apparent reason. At the end of the book, however, she rather publicly gives birth to a "fatherless" child on the very eve of Yom Kippur.
The book's structure is unusual, covering the same short period several times over. While it focuses on a single climatic year, it also extends out beyond that year both forwards and backwards to let us discover more and more about the characters.
Thus the first part of the book tells the story of the vilda hayas and other women in the village, each section written from a particular individual's viewpoint, and each section adding to what we already know. Then it's the men's turn, and their stories give a quite different spin to what the women had thought about events - things that were barely mentioned in the women's stories can become highlights in the men's, and vice versa. And finally, Misha, who is in a sense the centre of the village and the story, has the last pages of the book to herself. Though we finally find out the answers to one or two secrets, this section mainly draws all the strands together, and climaxes with the birth we've been waiting for throughout the book.
Also woven throughout is a sense of the mystical - we're never quite sure whether angels appear, and perhaps they do in one or two scenes, disguised as unnamed strangers - and the mystical world is seen through the heightened eyes of not just the more 'spiritual' characters, but even through the eyes of those who wouldn't consider themselves spiritual in any degree. The inherent religious sense of the Jewish people pervades the book.
It's a remarkable debut novel from this Canadian Jewish writer, who has expended great effort in recreating a world now lost. But it's never a novel that emphasizes its research - the things we learn about the village way of life are seamlessly incorporated. Even the frequent use of Yiddish words never becomes a stumbling block to the reader. Though there is a glossary at the back (as well as a very interesting bibliography), I found I seldom needed to use it.
The story is full of subtle clues that are easily missed first time round, so it would be worth a second reading. However, if you don't make it that far, read it once at least!