THE TEARS AND PRAYERS OF FOOLS, Russian translation of Pale-of-Settlement historical novel

THE TEARS AND PRAYERS OF FOOLS
GRIGORY KANOVICH (tr. Mary Ann Szporluk)
Syracuse University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$39.95 all editions, available now

40% off purchases of translations direct from the publisher until 15 September 2025

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: This extraordinary novel is part of Grigory Kanovich’s “Litvak saga,” his tribute to Jewish life before the Holocaust. Set in a small Lithuanian town in the late nineteenth century, the story begins with the arrival of a stranger who sets everyone on edge and seems to know their secrets. Is he a messenger from God, a long-lost son, a saint, or a madman?


As the stranger in the velvet yarmulke makes his rounds, we meet an unforgettable cast of characters—Rabbi Uri, the aged rabbi; Itsik Magid, the strapping young woodcutter; Golda, the resourceful widow; Markus Fradkin, the wealthy timber merchant, and his beautiful daughter Zelda; Yeshua Mandel, the tavern keeper, his troubled son Simeon, and Morta, their devoted servant girl. A work of realism as well as a parable, Kanovich’s novel illuminates the most intimate fears, dreams, and longings of the shtetl’s inhabitants.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I feel utterly inadequate to the task of reviewing this book, after reading this on Edelweiss+: "‘Shtetl noir’ meets Hasidic legend in this deeply philosophical work. In a word, this novel is the work of an exceptional writer with a unique voice.—Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Professor Emerita, New York University". That is it, she's said it all, go get you one.

"Shtetl noir" is a term I've never heard before, but the instant I read it crystallized the affect of this story. I'm not all the way sure about the realism angle the publisher trumpets in the synopsis because I was never there in 1880s Imperial Russia, and after reading the story do not feel as though I've been there. It's the usual problem with historical fiction. It's enough removed from my life that I'm not adept at putting myself into the place; 1880s Pale-of-Settlement Russian Empire life is not in my 1960s-Sunbelt American worldview.

I'm astonished that the author lived to know, though I don't think see, this favorite of his ten novels appear at long last in English. He died at 93 in 2023, a life lived during the waning days of the Yiddish culture of Eastern European Jewry, through to Soviet times before he emigrated to Israel.

This novel feels much like I'd expect it to, knowing all that. There are bits and snatches of memory, scenes I was sure were utterly clear before his eyes as he wrote them. Maybe it's telling, though I can't know on whom, that the most clearly limned scenes and characters in my reading were Simeon Mandel the...troubled...son of the innkeeper and that man himself.

I loved the way I felt included in the read as we moved from scene to scene and place to place. In part that's because the book has a map in the front. I so appreciate that when the story takes place in several locations. I'm also grateful for the glossary (and please note the transliterations are not the usual ones, but reflect Lithuanian pronunciation) and dramatis personae, though that last is in the back of the book which strikes me as odd.

The author's grandson made art for the chapter opens that I found pitch-perfect. The images are human and yet caught in moments of almost Mannerist...distortion, contortion, well incongruity with the geometry of consensus reality. In many ways that is the "noir" I noted above as crystalizing the read for me. I found all the multivarious problems the characters face almost absurd, they bend and twist the sense of right and reason, all applied from the outside in. As in all noir tales, it's the unseen and faceless threats that unsettle and unnerve.

A story I don't know how to summarize because it is so deep but so deft with it; so dense with meanings we're not in daily contact with; so rife with assumptions we don't make in the twenty-first century, that I'm overwhelmed with the need to explain. It's not clear to me why you'll read this story. I wish you would. It's a world-view opener.

RED SKY MORNING: The Epic True Story of Texas Ranger Company F, the kind of focused-on-a-story history that fascinates my Texas-rooted self

RED SKY MORNING: The Epic True Story of Texas Ranger Company F
JOE PAPPALARDO
St. Martin's Press
$29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The explosive and bloody true history of Texas Rangers Company F, made up of hard men who risked their lives to bring justice to a lawless frontier.

Between 1886 and 1888, Sergeant James Brooks, of Texas Ranger Company F, was engaged in three fatal gunfights, endured disfiguring bullet wounds, engaged in countless manhunts, was convicted of second-degree murder, and rattled Washington, D.C. with a request for a pardon from the US president. His story anchors the tale of Joe Pappalardo's Red Sky Morning, an epic saga of lawmen and criminals set in Texas during the waning years of the “Old West.”

Alongside Brooks are the Rangers of Company F, who range from a pious teetotaler to a cowboy fleeing retribution for killing a man. They are all led by Captain William Scott, who cut his teeth as a freelance undercover informant but was facing the end of his Ranger career. Company F hunted criminals across Texas and beyond, killing them as needed, and were confident they could bring anyone to “Ranger justice.” But Brooks’ men met their match in the Conner family, East Texas master hunters and jailbreakers who were wanted for their part in a bloody family feud.

The full story of Company F’s showdown with the Conner family is finally being told, with long dead voices being heard for the first time. This truly hidden history paints the grim picture of neighbors and relatives becoming snitches and bounty hunters, and a company of Texas Rangers who waded into the conflict only to find themselves over their heads—and in the fight of their lives.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'll start by lauding what other readers have liked least about this book: It is a mosaic of multiple stories, and intentionally so. The design of a history that's focused on a story, not a biography, is to collate the fascinating pieces and ugly, disfiguring truths that make up the whole picture of the moment in question...it's meant to be taken in piece by piece, and assembled in one's mental theater as a whole image of The Defining Conflict.

To that end, we meet the main main, James Brooks, as he surveys Cotulla, Texas, on the day he joins the Texas Rangers in 1883. Author Pappalardo begins, then, at a beginning...but we're going to see other beginnings as we go along. We'll see the last of active Rangers Captain Brooks in Cotulla, too...and that's the kind of symmetry I appreciate in a story.

What happens between those two events, not hugely distant in time, is...a lot. A great deal more than one person's life generally holds, and a great deal less as well. Brooks, in his entire life of genuine service to the people of Texas, never shook a debilitating addiction to alcohol and an equally debilitating inability to form sustaining, intimate friendships with anyone. This included, as it is so sad to say, his own family. He was married to one woman his entire adult life. There is no record or indication in any recorded memory that he found any sense of companionship or happiness in their union, nor did she express any enduring or undying affection for her husband. His children were dutiful, and always played their role of help and sustenance for him, but again there is not any record of them feeling hero-worship for their truly outsized and outstanding father.

Brooks County, named for the Captain (as he always preferred to be referred to and addressed despite having the options of Representative or Judge), was a creation of the remarkable man's efforts to drag a thousand square miles of mesquite scrub and caliche and its few thousand residents out of the hands of a corrupt Democratic party machine in the early twentieth century. He was, at the time, a State Representative, and his life-long campaign of fair treatment for Spanish-speaking people and law-abiding souls of all skin colors and ethnicities made Brooks County and Falfurrias havens of good, equitable Democratic-party led government.

In the chapter dedicated to this end-of-life résumé of Brooks, there are résumés of his cohorts in Company F, all of whom were with the Captain during the main action of the book...the take-down of the Sabine County-based Conner crime family in the weird swampy Louisiana-like East Texas world. It was a long, tense fight on the logistical and legal levels, and Author Pappalardo doesn't stint on the practical details. There are a LOT of people in this story. There are a LOT of names that appear, then aren't mentioned for a while, then reappear with minimal fanfare. There is a Dramatis Personae that can be bookmarked or hyperlinked in your ereader, and I strongly suggest that any readers do that very thing. I found it hugely helpful and on occasion, to my utter lack of surprise, its completeness and thoroughgoing explanatory notes were interesting enough to make me want more books about this century-old vanished culture.

What I want from histories is a sense of the why of things. The what is great as a launchpad but I really treasure whys. In that arena, Author Pappalardo is a strong deliverer. I was never at a loss for reasons to pick up the book. I took it at a measured pace, a chapter a week and a section or two a day. I think this is the most likely technique to give the story its full room to expand and its details to slot into each others' proper settings. Since I am from Texas, I was prepared with some ideas of the roles of lawmen, and specifically the Texas Rangers, in the state's history. Since I am from that part of Texas, it was even more of a sense of homecoming, of learning my own family's cultural past. That added soupçon of personal connection is likely the source of the extra half-star I hung on the book.

It really is extra, as I can understand from others' responses to the read. Quite a few readers were unable to see the nature of the story being told and that is squarely on the author's shoulders. His stated aim is to answer this quote from one N.A. Jennings, a former Texas Ranger of that time and later an author in his own right:

"Near everyone has heard of the Texas Rangers, but how many know what the Rangers really are, or what are their duties? In a general way, everyone knows they are men who ride around on the Texas border, do a good deal of shooting, and now and then get killed or kill someone. But why they ride around, or why they do the shooting, is a question which might go begging for an answer for a long time without getting a correct one."

This expectation being set in the Introduction, I can see a history buff feeling let down. This isn't the book that answers that question. It doesn't seem to me to be particularly likely to, set up as it is to tell the story of a group of Rangers involved in one of the organization's formative operations. The personal focus falls most heavily, and in my opinion correctly so, on the Captain, James A. Brooks, and the people he led come in for bits and snatches of attention. But the light that shed on the Texas Rangers as a whole, while bright and revealing, does not get even partway to explaining the entire late-1800s period of the organization's existence that Author Pappalardo indicated it will.

But what the book actually does is, to my way of thinking at least, as valuable or even more so. It traces the roots and the branches of a conflict between the law-and-order forces of state power and the flouters of same whose actions and influence were seriously detrimental to the community as a whole's ability to live their lives free from fear and danger. There are people worse than police today, there were in the 1880s, and the worst is when those terrible actors turn the police into their henchmen. Along come the Texas Rangers of Company F to reset the expectations of the community for law enforcement...and they do.

For the better.

It might not be what we think of in terms of law enforcement's role today, after Rodney King's beating and George Floyd's and Ahmaud Arbery's murders at their hands; but it is true, it happened, and it's worth considering that if it seemed impossible to the people of Sabine County in 1885, and it wasn't, that it isn't impossible today either.

That deserves my attention, and my praise.

DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC, an excellent and unexplored alternate-history point of departure, a great President killed too soon

DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President
CANDICE MILLARD
Anchor Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: James A. Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back. 

But the shot didn’t kill Garfield. The drama of what hap­pened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in tur­moil. The unhinged assassin’s half-delivered strike shattered the fragile national mood of a country so recently fractured by civil war, and left the wounded president as the object of a bitter behind-the-scenes struggle for power—over his administration, over the nation’s future, and, hauntingly, over his medical care. A team of physicians administered shockingly archaic treatments, to disastrous effect. As his con­dition worsened, Garfield received help: Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, worked around the clock to invent a new device capable of finding the bullet. 

Meticulously researched, epic in scope, and pulsating with an intimate human focus and high-velocity narrative drive, The Destiny of the Republic will stand alongside The Devil in the White City and The Professor and the Madman as a classic of narrative history.

My Review: I knew next to nothing about this president. I'd sort-of known he was assassinated, but not much about why. “Oh, the one in the 1880s? Didn't some nut kill him?”

What a story this is. What a gargantuan loss to the USA his non-Presidency was. What an interesting, interesting man! We hear reams about presidents significantly less interesting than Garfield was. It's not right. But it makes sense...all he did as president was get killed a couple months after he was sworn in.

Garfield was a self-made man, from a poor family, with a troubled marriage. (Ring any more recent bells?) His wife was a chilly intellectual on whom he cheated once. (PLEASE tell me you've got it now.) And even more like the C-man, Garfield entered the race for the White House with powerful people strongly opposed to his winning. He was thwarted and stymied and made to do battle over things that were deeply entrenched and very wrong with the political culture of the day, and he only sort of won.

I trust my parallel is made.

So I was surprised to learn that Garfield was a Republican, and a populist progressive reforming one. (That sentence gave me vertigo to type. I'm not used to saying nice things about Republicans.) My, how things have changed! And the system he fought against actually, literally ended up costing him his life. In that time, presidents controlled all government jobs, and so the people who wanted to get security got in good with the party and made their case for a job to one harassed man, with maybe a secretary or two to assist him...good people got jobs, I'm sure, but more bad ones got good jobs than the other way around. In denying a very bad applicant a “spoils” job, Garfield signed his own death warrant.

Charles Guiteau, who shot Garfield in the back as he was to board a train in order to visit his recuperating wife, isn't his murderer. That person is the doctor who cared for him in the most backward possible way, Dr. D. Willard Bliss. Of evil memory ptooptoo. Despite Dr, James Lister's empirical proof of the germ theory's truth by means of reducing post-surgical mortality via sterilization of instruments and rooms, Bliss held to the old-fashioned view that it was falderol to say something you couldn't see could kill a man. Bliss, if you can believe this, stuck his finger in the bullet hole in Garfield's back in the train station, on the floor, with no washing!

It's a wonder he didn't die a lot sooner, with this kind of “care,” isn't it? As it is, the almost obnoxiously healthy and virile Garfield was shot on 2 July and didn't die until 19 September. Months of infections, months of idiot Bliss being wrong about everything (he said categorically that the bullet was lodged on the right side...it was on the left, it turned out...and he refused to even investigate the left side), and the potential great president died in agony. His vice-president was Chester Alan Arthur, that monadnock of probity and intellect. Oh dear, I fear my sarcasm gland is dripping again.

Well, okay, so it's clear I liked the story. I also liked the book. The author also wrote a book on Teddy Roosevelt, another Republican progressive and all-around fascinating man, called The River of Doubt. It's a really good story, and a very good read. She has an affinity for real-life drama, Madame Millard, and she has an excellent ear for the phrase that will illuminate it. In Chapter 14, entitled “All Evil Consequences,” this phrase in particular wrung my withers:

Had Garfiled been shot just fifteen years later, the bullet in his back would have been quickly found by X-ray images, and the wound treated with antiseptic surgery. Had he been able to receive modern medical care, he likely would have spent no more than a few nights in the hospital.

Such are the vagaries of history...the good wand worthy die, the evil and vile get new hearts at taxpayer expense.

Candice Millard writes a good yarn. If all you want is an exciting and interesting story, this book will satisfy you. If you're interested in history, it will enrich you. If you're excited by the odd pathways of fate, this could be the best of 2012 for you. I'm all of the above. I was sucked in from the get-go, and came out a happy, happy angry man.

THE LOST SKETCHBOOK OF EDGAR DEGAS, a beautiful novel told in a deeply immersive voice

THE LOST SKETCHBOOK OF EDGAR DEGAS
HARRIET CHESSMAN
Outpost19 (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 eBook editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Ten years after Edgar Degas' 1872 visit to New Orleans, a lost sketchbook surfaces. His Creole cousin Tell -- who lost her sight as a young woman -- listens as her former child-servant describes the drawings and reads Degas' enigmatic words. It's both cryptic and revelatory, leading Tell to new understandings of her marriage, her difficult, brilliant cousin Edgar, her daughter Josephine, and herself.

***THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANKS JON!***

My Review: In the spirit of full disclosure, Harriet is my social media pal and the best of friends. It's unlikely I'd've published a negative review of the book under those circumstances, but equally unlikely I'd be so disrespectful as to puff up a book I did not enjoy. If you can't say anything nice, say nothing, is the tack I take on reviewing books by friends.

Luckily for the world, I absolutely adored reading this book. I have the good fortune to have seen a number of Degas's works in person, and I am familiar with New Orleans and its culture from years of contact with it and its practitioners. As I was reading the book, I'd come across things that spoke to me of the unique place that New Orleans is.

Honor reads a description of the city of New Orleans. Edgar appears to have written this on the eve of his departure. I almost can't listen, caught and struck as I am by some of the images: the city as a huge sleeping cat, washed and clean, or foul; something about Lake Pontchartrain's beauty. Something "glittering," something "humming." Lemon trees and orange trees. People of all colors. It moves me, in the wake of Edgar's despair, to discover in his own words how much he cherished about this city I love so much, in spite of all. What might have happened if he could have stayed, for a summer, another winter? Could he have felt healed? Could he have found comfort? Maybe even love?

It's not necessary to spell it out in blocks of visual data. In this case, as the narrator has lost her sight, it would be deeply suspect to do so. But what New Orleans is, in the end, is a place of the heart and soul more than a physical entity. New Orleans is either your home or it isn't, and you're aware of the answer from the second you arrive. It is undeniable and it is for life: You're a yat at heart or the magic is lost on you.

The magic is lost on me.

That doesn't mean I don't get it, though. I get what draws people to the place. I think Chessman's words vivify the spell of New Orleans as much as they limn the landscape of art. The narrative device of a lost sketchbook filled with New Orleans's grace and beauty by one of the leading artists of the time read to a blind woman relative of that artist by one of the subjects of his art is delightful. It requires no effort to understand...and that's the highest compliment I can offer a writer irrespective of the genre in which she works. Framing devices are too often part of a Conversation With The Reader. I don't appreciate that kind of story. I want you to lift me out of my comfy reading posture and transport me to your story's locale without making blaring announcements like a train's conductor does.

And that is Harriet Chessman's gift.

Here on my lap is something Edgar held once, and many times, something he opened, often, to record what he saw in our pretty, messy, crowded house. I wonder if Edgar still misses this sketchbook. I wonder what his days are like now. He must have filled dozens, hundreds, more such books since that winter when he was our guest.

In a passage tesserated from simple words, the complex conceit of the book takes shape. Telly, our blind point-of-view character, vivifies the world Chessman creates for us to inhabit. Telly is never obtrusive...she isn't the point of her own story, how typically female...she talks to us like she's across the tea table, she chats with us as she would any friend come to wile away an afternoon. It becomes more and more obvious to the reader that Telly inhabits her time with her cousin Edgar as old people inhabit their past. She is the mother of young people, she is the wife of a good man, and she is blind. She is blind in her eyes and she is blind in her heart and she gropes for understanding at every turn, physical or psychical.

Over the course of these 130-ish pages, I felt myself adjusting my reading speed to expand my pleasure in Telly's company. Odile and Honor came to feel like intruders, not one a beloved child and the other a welcome visitor. I was jealous of the attention they commanded from Telly. How silly, I'd tell myself, as annoyance whipped through me at Telly addressing one or the other. As it happened, Edgar, to whom Telly speaks in her memories of the past, elicited no such response from me. I was, instead, a full participant in Telly's relationship to her glamorous Parisian cousin.

I love reading books where I am that fully engrossed, carried out of the 21st century. It's a pleasure to be made that transparent to one's own eyes. I recommend this read to anyone looking for an immersive experience that won't require an entire month to read but will leave food for thought to keep you ruminating for months to come.

TO THE BRIGHT EDGE OF THE WORLD, my vote for Historical Fiction in Goodreads Choice Awards

TO THE BRIGHT EDGE OF THE WORLD
EOWYN IVEY
Little, Brown
$11.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Set again in the Alaskan landscape that she bought to stunningly vivid life in THE SNOW CHILD, Eowyn Ivey's new novel is a breathtaking story of discovery and adventure, set at the end of the nineteenth century, and of a marriage tested by a closely held secret.

Colonel Allen Forrester receives the commission of a lifetime when he is charged to navigate Alaska's hitherto impassable Wolverine River, with only a small group of men. The Wolverine is the key to opening up Alaska and its huge reserves of gold to the outside world, but previous attempts have ended in tragedy.

For Forrester, the decision to accept this mission is even more difficult, as he is only recently married to Sophie, the wife he had perhaps never expected to find. Sophie is pregnant with their first child, and does not relish the prospect of a year in a military barracks while her husband embarks upon the journey of a lifetime. She has genuine cause to worry about her pregnancy, and it is with deep uncertainty about what their future holds that she and her husband part.

A story shot through with a darker but potent strand of the magic that illuminated THE SNOW CHILD, and with the sweep and insight that characterised Rose Tremain's The Colour, this new novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Eowyn Ivey singles her out as a major literary talent.

My Review: I voted for this book in the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards. A more heartfelt vote I've yet to cast.

Eowyn Ivey's modern Alaskan fairy tale THE SNOW CHILD was excellent. This epistolary novel is a step farther along the road to literary fame. I was totally captivated by Sophie and Allen's letters to each other; I enjoyed the use of other documents, like the young couples' journals and the paperwork that always attends anything to do with a government job and newspaper clippings recounting the excitement of the day for exploration. (How sad that this national trait is lost.)

The adventures the two nineteenth-century characters have are rip-snortin' bull-ridin' full-bore dangerous scary things. Sophie, in a small restricted life, busts out of her corset and strait-jacket to grab her some living while hubby is away having Manly Dangerous Feats thrown at him, and each enjoys their own hugely while supporting the other's excitement in letters from afar. It's a good marriage, it seemed to me. I think Ivey deserves a chunk of Alaska's petrodollars for making the place sound so incredibly, magically appealing. Her couples make getting married and being in Alaska sound like the road to happiness and concord.

The modern-day component to the story isn't the most involving. Joshua and Walt don't weave that old magic, perhaps because they don't make a couple. (Now that would've been interesting.) I am not willing to do much damage to my rating of the overall impact of the story, though, because the third leg of the stool is just a bit shorter than the others. Ivey has just vaulted onto the "buy her stuff right now" list with this outing.