HASSOUNA MOSBAHI'S PAGE: WE NEVER SWIM IN THE SAME RIVER TWICE, both a truism and an Eternal Verity; and SOLITAIRE: A Novel, a title very fitting

WE NEVER SWIM IN THE SAME RIVER TWICE
HASSOUNA MOSBAHI (tr. William Maynard Hutchins)
Syracuse University Press
$32.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Originally published in 2020, Hassouna Mosbahi’s riveting novel explores the human psyche amidst the turbulent aftermath of the Arab Spring in Tunisia. Through the experiences of three friends, Mosbahi narrates the profound impact of violence and cultural change in Tunisian society and the ways in which those shifts are reflected in their personal lives.

We meet Saleem, on the brink of turning fifty, whose once blissful marriage teeters on the edge as his mental health deteriorates. Aziz, a retired postal clerk with an unassuming appearance, finds solace in literature and international cinema. And Omran, a well-traveled writer and public intellectual, navigates a complex relationship with a young Franco-Tunisian woman who lives in Paris. As these men forge an unlikely friendship over drinks at a coastal bar in Bizerte, and through long walks along the beach, they grapple with the increasing political extremism that surrounds them. Repelled by the Jihadist rhetoric and the brand of masculinity it represents, the three friends question their relationship to their country, which is both their home and a place they feel alienated from.

We Never Swim in the Same River Twice offers an alternative narrative of the Arab Spring, one that challenges Western media’s depiction of a “blessed revolution,” and gives readers an intimate and elegiac portrait of Tunisian history.

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My Review: William Maynard Hutchins, who translated this story, is soeone whose work I admire and seek out. He came to my attention thirty-plus years ago when I first read, and loved, Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy. In the hands of a less skiled translator that somewhat sudsy family saga could've become cloyingly moralistic...a fate that befell the later translation of Midaq Alley in my opinion.

I've been at a loss; this book did not irresistibly draw me in, but it's much better than most books I read. It's not to my taste. Its message very much is. Then I read World Literature Today's review of it, by M.D. Allen, of whom I've never heard before: (link: https://worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/july/we-never-swim-same-river-twice-hassouna-mosbahi)

...{visiting} a newly independent Algeria makes {the author's stand-in} consider that the Islamist establishment there also now misrepresents the protracted and bloody war that has just ended as having been fought not against colonial rule but in favor of “fatwas advocating violence, [and] a culture of hatred and loathing.”

Mosbahi’s high reputation as a novelist will not be hurt by this very readable work, which gives a vivid if not especially pleasant picture of post–Arab Spring Tunisia; nor will anyone but the most intransigent of his political opponents deny his moral courage.

This is a message I can not help but support, said however, aimed wherever, in whichever language of culture. Moral courage IN PUBLIC is more important now than it has ever been in my lifetime, though I stipulate that it is not and has never been unimportant.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SOLITAIRE: A Novel
HASSOUNA MOSBAHI
Syracuse University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In Hassouna Mosbahi’s engrossing and keenly observed novel, he takes readers deep into one day in the life of Yunus, a Tunisian intellectual.

A professor of French language and Flaubert specialist, Yunus is recently retired and separated from his wife, as he leaves the city to settle in the Tunisian coastal city of Nabeul.

Searching for solitude, he hopes to spend the remainder of his life among the books he loves.

On the day of his sixtieth birthday, Yunus plunges into a delayed midlife crisis as he reflects on the major moments in his life, from taking up writing as a young man to his career as a university professor to his failed marriage.

Yunus’s identity crisis mirrors that of his Tunisian homeland with its tumultuous history of political and cultural upheaval.

He meditates on the lives of his friends, drawing from his memory a colorful cast of characters whose experiences reflect the outsized influence of religion and tradition in their lives.

Through the eyes of Yunus, Mosbahi’s elegiac, literary novel explores life and death, love and writing, and the relationship between puritanism and extremism in the Arab world today.

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My Review: Quiet ruminations of a man younger than me that I'd've hated at forty, been scared by at fifty, and...uncomfortably...relate to at *mumble*ty-five.

I seemed to be a dead man granted a chance to observe the joy of life from the darkness of the tomb. The glass escaped from my hand, and shards of its glass flew across the kitchen floor. I did not hear the laughter overflowing with love that a smashing glass had inspired in a poet—it may have been Apollinaire, Eluard, or someone else. What I heard was my spirit splintering like the dry bough of a green tree. I left the kitchen and went to the bedroom to curl up in bed. I closed my eyes, wishing to flee from my black soul to another world. At some moment, a different vision of my country dawned on me—not the vague, gloomy one I had grown accustomed to harboring as an expatriate. It came to me with the radiant light of a Mediterranean morning on the beach at Les Grottes in Bizerte, green and fragrant like the vineyards and the orchards of figs and almonds in the spring at Raf Raf, dreamy like sunset in the oases of el-Djerid, and white and blue like the houses in Sidi Bou Said. I leapt out of bed happily, like someone who had long misplaced something and found it again after despairing that he ever would find it. So, I returned to my fatherland.

It's nice, and it's resonant...I felt the same way returning to New York after exile in Texas...but y'all, do not overlook that "fatherland" ending this passage. This is not a western country but a westernized one, and it really shows. There are assumptions inside this narrative invisible to a Tunisian man of a certain age, women exist in relation to me being the most toxic one.

It's not unusual, honestly, in literature from anywhere to see men taking women for granted. It bothers me more now than ever because the world is at the intersection of multiple crises and can not remotely afford to turn away minds and hands needed to figure out then apply solutions to the problems we face.

A shame it's not so stone-cold simple, and obvious, to the old white men desperately clinging to power.

As I was saying...Author Mosbahi has some assumptions that jangle warning bells in my 21st-century-woke mind. The narrator, still less the author, demonstrate the remotest awareness of their cultural blinders, which the best, the most successful critically anyway, US writers are at long last coming to do. We've all got miles to go before we sleep.

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.

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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.

PACKAGED LIVES: Ten Stories and a Novella, fiction that tells the truths of Iraqi lives

PACKAGED LIVES: Ten Stories and a Novella
HAIFA ZANGANA (tr. Wen-Chin Ouyang)
Syracuse University Press
$14.95 all editions, available now

Save 40% off on direct-from-publisher purchases of all literature in translation with discount code 05WIT25 now through September 15, 2025.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The carefully crafted, subtle, and humorous stories in Packaged Lives show Zangana at her best as a fiction writer. She portrays her subjects keenly, sensitively, and lovingly but without compromise. Iraqis living in exile come to life in her narratives as men and women who are caught between two worlds. They cannot return to their homeland and are forced to wait for news of Iraq from afar. At the same time, they are unable to fully adjust to life in Britain and make a new home for themselves. The question “What is home?” is at the heart of each story in this collection. Her protagonists, who are stuck in ready-made lives, or “packaged lives,” struggle to set themselves free from a web of relationships in which they are entangled. Art, poetry, and nature provide lines of escape. The relief may be fleeting, but the peace of mind and serenity are reached through the moment of epiphany at the end of each story, a much-needed balm.

Haifa Zangana is an Iraqi Kurdish writer and activist. She is the author of Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London, City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman’s Account of War and Resistance, Dreaming of Baghdad, and Party for Thaera: Palestinian Women Writing Life, among others.

Wen-chin Ouyang is professor of Arabic and comparative literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is the author of Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel: Nation-State, Modernity and Tradition, and Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel: Nation-State, Modernity and Tradition. She has been working towards Arabic-Chinese comparative literary and cultural studies, including Silk Road studies.

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My Review: The author's life is, in the tiny squib above, an abbreviated roll call of her creativity. What is most important you don't discover until reading Michael Beard's Introduction: She is old enough to remember a pre-Saddam Iraq, one that was becoming its best self; then the translator, in her fresh bereavement, fills in those bones with the emotional muscles and life-lived sinews of her long friendship with the author and her own husband. The image called forth is of a loose, but powerful, bond of those few friends one makes in life who can be called "true blue through-and-through besties."

As is my established custom, you'll get a story-by-story note and rating, then a summation, or the Bryce Method as it's better known around here.

Evensong




Chatter




Delirium




Duck




Day




Refuge




Turnstile




Cave




Pilgrimage




Painting




Packaged Life

REVOLUTIONS OF ALL COLORS, bisexual love & happiness just beyond reach

REVOLUTIONS OF ALL COLORS
DEWAINE FARRIA
Syracuse University Press
$22.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Gabriel Mathis, a twenty-three-year-old aspiring fantasy writer and reluctant Russophile, travels to Ukraine to teach English and meets the love of his life: an international arms dealer very much out of his league. Simon—a former Special Forces medic, torn over a warped sense of duty and a child he did not want—returns to the US to pursue his dream of becoming a mixed martial artist. After spending his adolescence defending his bisexuality, Michael makes his mark in New York's fashion industry while nursing resentment for a community that never accepted him.

Farria traces the lives of brothers Michael and Gabriel and their friend Simon from adolescence to their mid-twenties, through Oklahoma, Afghanistan, New York, Somalia, Ukraine, and New Orleans. Revolutions of All Colors is a brash, funny, and honest look at the evolution of characters we don't often see—black nerds and veterans bucking their community's rigid parameters of permissible expression while reconciling love of their country with the injustice of it.

At its core, this is a novel about the uniquely American dilemma of chiseling out an identity in a country still struggling to define itself.

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My Review: So, what does one do with a story that sets him reeling, causes hours-long meditation breaks, and ultimately makes him want to scream in outrage? How, on each and every page, something just...beats against the inside of his skull? No, not the racism.

I'm used to stories about how hard it is to be Black, but told in the SATANIC SECOND PERSON?! Okay, okay, not *all* of it's in the Satanic Second, but more than the occasional bit it...everything from Simon's PoV. (And why doesn't Michael have a voice? The bisexual and proud of nothing man could be a novel by himself!)

Oh my stars and garters, it took a lot out of me to finish this really well-structured, emotionally resonant as only the most complete and truthful ones are, novel of three brothers. Well, two brothers and a brother-friend who's essentially raised by their father. Quite, quite fraught, these relationships...and it shows in the way the narratives are created: Simon, the outsider, gets the Satanic Second Person narrative voice, which hurts me to see or say; Gabriel (every time I read his name I hear Blow Gabriel Blow, even before...events...transpire) the direct address of first person along with his beguiling love interest the Ukrainian arms dealer; Michael...a ghost, no direct narrative. It's a complicated schema (in the literary sense) that guides the reader's perceptions and responses to each character. It also reinforces the characters' own sense of themselves, with Simon being the perpetual outsider, only addressed never addressing, and Michael the unwanted Other, something he can never forgive the world for. He opts out...bullied bisexual different lad, it's the only way he can see to make himself the center of his own story. He has to vanish himself from the world he came from to present himself in his new milieu of the fashion and beauty industry. And how perfect is that, I ask you....

So the burden of this refrain is that fathering isn't parenting, and mothering can only get a boy so far. The people in your life, all of them, are part of your coming-to-be process for better or worse, and they're there because they could be, chose to be, and chose you. Again, for better or for worse. Simon, whose wildness is more a cosmic scream of agony, never stops, rarely slows, and always disappoints. Hey, it's an identity...and Michael, whose fade-away was so much less theatrical than Simon's, is the one who calls him to account. When their father, their shared father, dies, as we know our elders must, it's bog-standard typical of Simon that he doesn't show for the funeral of this man whose presence in his life was an anchor, a stability that he had to reject to bring into the open the rejection he feels he must deserve. "He was your father too. Closest thing you had. But fatherhood doesn’t mean shit to you, does it?" says Michael, invisible gone-away Michael, to him, hitting the one sore spot that only your real family can reach.

The blow lands; the wound is mortal; but to what, remains the question.

The read is part of the Syracuse University program called the "Veterans Writing Award sponsored by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families and Syracuse University Press." Longer-term readers will remember my review of Thomas Bardenwerper's Mona Passage, also a winner of this prize, and see the thread that connects them: I like reading about people not like me, and not like me in positive, interesting ways. Author Farria writes as a veteran (as I am not) and about bisexual Black men, absolute hen's teeth in the QUILTBAG representation algorithm. Bisexual when unmodified by "man/male/men" is now meant to be read as "woman." Or so it seems in the marketing done to the QUILTBAGgers. I am all for that changing to include the bisexual men of our various overlapping communities.

What made this novel such a good read for me was that acknowledgment that we, the QUILTBAG folk, exist in all families, take up space that we deserve and we are entitled to, and that goes for every family everywhere. It's telling that Michael's bullying drives him away; it's telling that he is the only one to have the standing to call out Simon, the man mired in a sense of himself as unworthy, because Michael has been sent that message as well. It's the way Author Farria makes all those pieces come together that gives me such a vivid and personal sense of this read's message of inclusiveness. It's a screwed up family that produced Simon, Michael, and Gabriel, but it's a family and it is a powerful one to make men whose monstrous sadness and pain didn't destroy them. Take a minute...think about your own life...what were the before-and-afters there? These three men, brothers, are bound by that before-and-after that came long before the showy, flashy one.

Definitely a talented writer's first novel. May many more follow it.

HARRY HAFT: Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano for Holocaust Remembrance Day

HARRY HAFT: Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano
ALAN HAFT
Syracuse University Press
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Alan Scott Haft provides the first-hand testimony of his father, Harry Haft, a holocaust victim with a singular story of endurance, desperation, and unrequited love. Harry Haft was a sixteen-year-old Polish Jew when he entered a concentration camp in 1944. Forced to fight other Jews in bare-knuckle bouts for the perverse entertainment of SS officers, Harry quickly learned that his own survival depended on his ability to fight and win. Haft details the inhumanity of the "sport" in which he must perform in brutal contests for the officers. Ultimately escaping the camp, Haft's experience left him an embittered and pugnacious young man.

Determined to find freedom, Haft traveled to America and began a career as a professional boxer, quickly finding success using his sharp instincts and fierce confidence. In a historic battle, Haft fights in a match with Rocky Marciano, the future undefeated heavyweight champion of the world. Haft's boxing career takes him into the world of such boxing legends as Rocky Graziano, Roland La Starza, and Artie Levine, and he reveals new details about the rampant corruption at all levels of the sport.

In sharp contrast to Elie Wiesel's scholarly, pious protagonist in Night, Harry Haft is an embattled survivor, challenging the reader's capacity to understand suffering and find compassion for an antihero whose will to survive threatens his own humanity. Haft's account, at once dispassionate and deeply absorbing, is an extraordinary story and an invaluable contribution to Holocaust literature.

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My Review: I'm not the first person to pick up a boxing story. The violence and brutality inherent in the "sport" (which was used by ancient Greeks as military training) are, honestly, repulsive to me. I'm not famous for my delight in Holocaust stories, either.

What's going on here?

Stories like Pollak's Arm and The Vanished Collection feature the Jewish élite's fates, the kind of people who knew people whose names get into history books. Statistically not all the Jews in the Holocaust, dead or alive, could be those people; Hertzka Haft was a street kid, a hard-luck story from before there was a Holocaust, and whose survival was down to the fact that he could—and would—knock the ever-livin' snot out of other people to amuse and entertain his jailers.

There was nothing easy about Hertzka...Harry, in later life...Haft's life. He was the eighth and final child his mother bore...but she was so used to it she thought she was having gas pains, and *pow* Harry hit the floor under the tub of washing she was doing. His father died when he was three; his oldest siblings blamed him for infecting their mother with typhoid fever. His rock-tough self, and her with such rugged health, barely knew they had it; poor ol' papa passed beyond the veil from it in about a week.

Things really didn't get a lot easier from there on.

What I expect will shock readers is how...clear...Author Alan Haft, son of Harry, is. He doesn't linger over Dad's hurts. He doesn't shy away from the abuse Harry endured at the hands of his oldest brother, at the hands of the "christian" establishment, at the hands of the German invaders, the New York boxing establishment. He survived it all and didn't do it by being sweet, or intellectually pondering and systematizing the awful, painful stuff he's forced to endure simply for the privilege of continuing to breathe.

He was angry and he was strong and Harry Haft used those things as rocket fuel to extract his price for the sufferings he endured. Nothing, and I mean not one thing, stood between Harry and what he knew was his due. He hit people, and I don't mean polite punching like you see in sanitized boxing movies. I mean Alan Haft, clearly a good listener, understood that Harry never hit anyone without being extremely clear that 1) he had no choice but they'd see it coming and b) he was going to make sure that he got what was coming to him.

Given my uninterest in this sort of violence...ego-driven, honor-bound, these aren't ways to earn my sympathy...why am I rating this book so close to four stars? Because I think Harry Haft was the kind of man you'd want to know, to get in good with. Harry Haft suffered fools not at all, and those men are special friends who never once let your b.s. stand in the way, who never once fail you in a pinch. The Harry Hafts of the world love hard...an entire boxing career so he could be famous...not for fun, or even money, but so his lost Leah would hear about Harry Haft, see his photo, know to come find him.

That man, that force of nature, is getting a biopic tonight, this Holocaust Remembrance Day, on HBO Max. If it's among your channels, go look for The Survivor. I question that title. Given the horrors of his life inside the camps, did he survive? His body lived on. But...how much damage can a being endure, death, cannibalism, the unfathomably cruel suffering of existing in the Land of Plenty when so many didn't make it out? Is that "survival" in any meaningful way?

Alan Haft asks that question, not out loud, by exploring his psychotically angry, guilt-stewed, violent father's world. Interviews conducted before Harry Haft's death fifteen years ago probably saved both of their lives. How Alan Haft put together an identity is little short of a miracle, and how he dug around his own PTSD and located enough grace to offer his father this generous, honest, and deeply loving send-off is the reason you should read it, watch it, listen to the audiobook. The world's never been short of Harry Haft-like souls. We've got more incoming from the new wars.

Learning what happened will help you be that much better at reaching for their broken, abused hands instead of staring coldly, vacantly past them. Truth to tell, your world will get bigger and be better for it, like theirs.

HAFEZ IN LOVE, so smoothly translated I forgot it wasn't English from the get-go

HAFEZ IN LOVE
IRAJ PEZESHKZAD (tr. Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi & Patricia J. Higgins)
Syracuse University Press
$24.95 all editions, available now

Save 40% off on direct-from-publisher purchases of all literature in translation with discount code 05WIT25 now through September 15, 2025.

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Shams al-Din Mohammad Hafez is in love. He is in love with a girl, with a city, and with Persian poetry. Despite his enmity with the new and dangerous city leader, the jealousy of his fellow court poets, and the competition for his beloved, Iran's favorite poet remains unbothered. When his wit and charm are not enough to keep him safe in Shiraz, his friends conspire to keep him out of trouble. But their schemes are unsuccessful. Nothing will chase Hafez from this city of wine and roses.

In Pezeshkzad's fictional account, Hafez's life in fourteenth-century Shiraz is a mix of peril and humor. Set in a city that is at once beautiful and cutthroat, the novel includes a cast of historical figures to illuminate this elusive poet of the Persian literary tradition. Shabani-Jadidi and Higgins's translation brings the beloved poetry of Hafez alive for an English audience and reacquaints readers with the comic wit and original storytelling of Pezeshkzad.

Iraj Pezeshkzad was born in Tehran in 1928 and educated in Iran and then France, where he received his law degree. He was a retired diplomat, journalist, and writer. He was the author of several plays, short stories, and novels, including My Uncle Napoleon. He died on 12 January 2022 in Los Angeles.

Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi is senior lecturer of Persian language and linguistics at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University.

Patricia J. Higgins is a University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Emerita at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh.

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

My Review: First, read this:

He agrees with everyone's opinion, from black to white. With his constant refrain, "We are all children of this land," he recognizes both sides: he who believes it is night, and he who believes it is day.
–and–
"O light of my eyes, don't forget that until a few months ago you and I were among the court favorites of the then-shah. If some of these 'many' {whom Hafez claims will hide him from pursuit} enjoyed our poetry, it was because the poetry pleased the shah. The power and honor of the shah was behind our poetry. Now our poetry is just poetry. And perhaps in the eyes of these 'many,' it is not even poetry. Perhaps some of the men who praised the poems of Shams al-Din Hafez without hearing them will come to agree with His Honor, the police chief, and consider them dirty."

This seems to me to represent the tone and tenor of the book's translation...I think it also gives a flavor of the world in which we're spending a few hours. The court of an insecure, unworthy ruler, whose jobs are done for him not by workers or even lackeys, but by henchmen, is a fertile place to set a love story. Especially when the lovers are unable to come together because the obstacle to them getting their love consummated is one of the aforementioned henchmen.

Our narrator, Mohammad Golandam, is Hafez's brother-in-law and long-time best friend. He's a sensible sort; we can not say the same for Shams al-Din...he who will become, in the fullness of time, Hafez; the two men are only twenty-three at the time of this story. It's easy to see why Golandam, as Hafez (let's use his famous, and short, handle from here on) addresses him, is anxious and on needles and pins. Hafez has made many a sarcastic, cutting remark in his poetry about the new power-wielder Mobarez al-Din Mohammad Mozaffar. This self-installed prince is a "...blood-shedding creature of God {who} understands neither literature nor poetry. He is one of those dull-hearted people who, in the words of Shams Qeis Razi, don't 'distinguish between the sound of music and the braying of an ass.' His source of pleasure and happiness is cutting off heads," entirely enough to strike poor Golandam with near-lethal agita given Hafez's indiscreet, but truthful and honest, characterizations of him:

To get his aversion to him off his chest, {Hafez} had used this phrase extremely carelessly in a lyric poem about repentance after a life of drinking and wenching:
The morality officer became a pious sheikh and forgot his debauchery.
It is my story that remained throughout the bazaar.

It's not too hard to imagine a thin-skinned leader whose response to verbal disrespect shown by those less powerful than he is being, um, disproportionate, is it. The problems are, of course, many in a world run by incompetent and malicious people. The story's not complete without wild schemes and convoluted plots and hilarious misinformation campaigns...there are no better stories, in my never-humble opinion, than the ones about True Love Thwarted!

And True Love it very much is. This poem is what Hafez writes for his morning glory Jahan while he was imprisoned by his oft-insulted rival for her affections, and while she was scheming to get him out by pretending to agree to marry his captor, and while Golandam and Hafez's honorary father schemed to get her out of the unwanted marriage and back into Hafez's arms:

I swear on the life of the belovèd that if I could reach my soul,
That would be the least of the gifts to her by her slave.
If my heart was not bound to a strand of her hair,
How would I have been at peace in this dark vessel made of dust?
Your face is like the sun in the sky, unique in the heavens;
If only your heart were a bit more kind.
You said to me, "What is the worth of the dust under her feet,
If the precious life were eternal?"
I wish you would emerge through my door like a beam of light,
That divine fate would shine on my eyes.
The cypress would acknowledge its lowliness compared to her stature
If it had ten tongues like the wild lily.
You wouldn't fall out of tune with Hafez's melody,
If you weren't the companion of the morning songbirds.

Okay, I don't understand one damn word of that, but I know yearning and longing and sheer miserable wretched being-in-loveness when it smacks me across six or seven centuries. There's plenty of this poetical stuff peppered around the story. There are many readers who will see that as a plus; I want, therefore, to be clear that you will be reading a lot of poetry when you read this novel. (And the clever-clogs blog readers will now be recalling my stance on poetry, and looking at this review's star rating, and drawing some brow-knitting conclusions.)

So why am I praising this book, this poetry-laden book about a poet in love with a woman? Because it's such a delight to read. Because Hafez, every time someone talks sense to him, says "mm hmm" and carries right on being In Love with Jahan and acting as if by sheer force of his will, backed by the spiritual power generated by the huge dynamo of his adoration for Jahan, Things Will Come Out Right.

But I won't tell you if they do or they don't because some things you need to find out for yourownself.

The book concludes with a Dramatis Personae, and a Glossary; both are very handy. The Dramatis Personae include markers for characters based on historical personages, meaning those not marked are invented; though the names and actions of historical people are used, they're probably all best seen as fictional. It's worth noting that, even though Hafez's love object in this story is Jahan, a woman, there's no way in Farsi or in Persian poetry's conventions for that to be certain. It's a feature of the language that pronouns aren't gendered. While Hafez is in love with a woman in twenty-first century Iran, there's absolutely no reason for that to be the case in fourteenth-century Shiraz. I merely note this fact, quite firmly stated by the translators, as a datum of some interest to some readers.

MONA PASSAGE, where humanity, lovingkindness, and geopolitical reality collide

MONA PASSAGE
THOMAS BARDENWERPER
Syracuse University Press
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Mona Passage is the story of two neighbors in San Juan, Puerto Rico: Galán Betances, a Cuban emigrant, and Pat McAllister, a young Coast Guard officer. During long evenings spent together talking on their Calle Luna rooftop, a deep friendship develops based on shared traumas and a common desire to heal. When Galán learns that his sister, Gabriela, is going to be committed to a mental health facility in Cuba, he plans her escape to Puerto Rico. Pat, whose Coast Guard cutter patrols the Mona Passage for drug traffickers and migrants, warns Galán that such a journey will be treacherous--perhaps fatal. Aware of the dangers but determined for Gabriela to live a full life, Galán hands over all the money he has to a Dominican smuggler based out of a San Juan nightclub, and Gabriela begins her terrifying journey.

Knowing that his cutter may be all that separates Galán and Gabriela—and haunted by the human suffering he has witnessed at sea—Pat must decide. Will he remain true to his oath, as his older brother had done in Iraq? Or will he risk his own future—and perhaps his freedom—for his closest friend?

On a moonless night, two armed vessels converge in the Mona Passage, and three lives change forever.

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

My Review: The stakes in this story could not possibly be higher. Two men, friends who have that certain connection that feels more like family, are set onto a collision course by the Large External Force that is Law.

You don't get more universal than that.

What makes this read stand out is the way it happens...the way Author Bardenwerper created it. He was Pat, he knows Pat's job...he knows what it means to be bound by Law to go against convictions you simply can't ignore. And, as is ever and always the case, no good deed goes unpunished.

Multiple times and in innumerable ways. There can only be so much good luck in the world, it seems, and some people burn through their tiny bit in no time at all. This story is about many of those people; this read is for those myriads of us who know, love, are those people. The decisions of people we'll never meet cost us precious resources, time or money or access. And we'll often never know how those souls are responsible for the landscape we are required to walk. And I think, as lessons I've been forced to learn myownself go, this one's the best one to revisit. As I read Pat's story, I felt so clearly the pitfalls, the disasters to come. The secret of the read is that I kept reading, kept my eyeballs on the page, as it unfolded. I cared about Galán, and Gabriela. I wanted them to be reunited, despite the many, many burdens that meant Galán would be shouldering. And Gabriela, well, we need our families, we need our people near us more when it's hardest for them to be there.

The main story here, though, is about the Wrongness of the World. It's so simple on a personal level...so very complicated as soon as higher authority gets hold of the narrative. It shows that Author Bardenwerper knows Pat's job...it shows that he's got the keys to a roman à clef in this novel. But most of all, it shows that he really, truly wrote from his heart, gave his full and complete self to creating this novel. It was a surprise to me to care this much about his characters. They weren't particularly well drawn, though that is not for want of trying. Whatever craft lacunae there are, are not there because the author is not working hard to fill them. It takes time and luck to fill out the weak spots in one's writing, and the world gives little of either to anyone.

Happily, Syracuse University Press has given Author Bardenwerper a leg up through their Veterans Writing Award, a program instituted to bring us the often-impossible-to-locate words of the actual people who do the hard, thankless work that being in the military requires. It is not a group of people we can afford to ignore. Our various military branches have many jobs, and some leave more traces behind than others. We're better able to learn about their world, and the world we all live in, now that this series exists.

This particular novel, Mona Passage, is a good way to enter that world and be present, be attentive, as its costs become prices paid by real people.

To celebrate the end of a long, long, bad, bad year...

...I'm going to make a new start on reviewing the books I liked, but don't feel called to perform a full review on. There are, without exaggeration, hundreds of books I'd like to alert people to, books that really deserve your eyeblinks, books I can happily if not enthusiastically encourage you to seek out. I just haven't had a framework to do it in, like the simple three-sentence review structure you see at right. That meme was posted by Author 'Nathan Burgoine on Twitter in 2019. He was, before becoming an author, a bookstore manager, and this is the structure he encouraged staff members who felt overwhelmed by the idea of Writing A Review to use.

I'm adopting it, and referring to the process as Burgoineing in the author's honor. (I hope he sees it as an honor.) I will fairly regularly, once or possibly twice a month as a baseline and more frequently as events warrant, post three- or four-Burgoined titles together. You can see I've already begun. In the next few days more Burgoines will appear, this being year-end and a perfect time to make the decks as clear as I possibly can for the *amazing* books I've already got in the works for 2021 reviews.

I have to give 2020 credit for one thing. While a lot of authors saw their book launches rescheduled, publishers canceled their tours, and everyone was hugely distracted by the nightmare of COVID-19 (I had it, you do not want it), no one can fault the astoundingly wonderful literature we got this year. My own annual six-stars-of-five read was Zaina Arafat's extraordinary debut novel YOU EXIST TOO MUCH (review lives here), a thirtysomething Palestinian woman telling me my life, my family, my very experience of relationships of all sorts. I cannot stress enough to you, this is the book you need to read in 2021. A sixtysomething man is here, in your email/feed, saying: This is the power. This is the glory. The writing I look for, the read I long to find, and all of it delivered in a young woman's debut novel. This is as good an omen for the Great Conjunction's power being bent to the positive outcomes as any I've seen.

I read fifty-seven books this quarter. That's nowhere near a personal best, but it's a lot more than I would've read if I hadn't had the bump that Burgoineing has given me! Liberation from the demands of making a deep dive into a book, instead being allowed by my own inner demons to enjoy then describe why I did that this vastly simpler and handily codified technique showed me. The reads were in the main first reads or review-induced second reads. The re-reads, mostly of old Agatha Christie stories or novels that I could blow through quickly because they're already familiar. At my age, I don't really want to devote a lot of time to rereading because, in the ~170-ish months I can expect to live, writers won't stop writing and publishers won't stop publishing. I see wonderful things, to paraphrase Howard Carter as he took in Tutankhamen's tomb goods.

Many of the most wonderful things I've seen in 2020 were translated things, What's Left of the Night quite possibly chief among them...or was it the first-ever translation from Yiddish of The Rivals & Other Stories, that dark and bitter draft of unsentimentalism about immigrant/emigrant Jewish life...permaybehaps it was The Slave Yards, that unexpected and welcome ray of hope centered in Benghazi. Those stories from far-away or long-gone places, more and more, have come to mean the most exciting reading I can do. New Vessel Press, Syracuse University Press, a raft of publishers are out there looking for and finding wonderful tales, translating them, and waiting for you to notice. I'd say it's a great year to set a challenge of reading a translation a month. Click on the tag "#2020Goals" and I'll bet you won't be at a loss of where to start for long.

There were some really pleasant surprises, like SHUGGIE BAIN winning the 2020 Booker Prize and selling over 200,000 copies. The Only Good Indians and Ring Shout appearing on endless "Best of 2020" lists. The Light Years appearing on my radar along with its mensch of an author, R.W.W. Greene. A good guy, one to watch, go follow him and see what a relief it is to have someone as classy and good-hearted as him imagining our future into being. Jennifer Marie Brissett, whose first novel Elysium I really loved, announced Destroyer of Light will come out in 2021, and Nicky Drayden's Symbiosis appears in February. On and on, a litany of things I look forward to, a long and happy and heartening trail of good news. I'm so grateful for it all, all the stuff there isn't room to celebrate here but there sure is room in my world for it!

On the other hand, I failed miserably at my goal of publishing an average of ten reviews a month in 2020. Months without reviews came largely because I was pretty miserable after I got this rotten COVID-19, and there are some long-term effects I'm not happy about but don't cause day-to-day killing fatigue and wretched headaches. I'm going to set the 2021 bar at fifteen reviews average per month...an ambitious one hundred eighty, more than I've managed since the earliest days of reposting reviews in the "Pages" to save them from being deleted (back in 2013, I had only Goodreads and LibraryThing as my review venues, and each had its issues). I'm a little bit anxious about that lofty goal, which is how it should be. Challenges, a little fear, and a whole new chance to make the 2020s rock instead of having them rock us.

THE SLAVE YARDS, nightmarish Benghazi reality translated from Arabic

THE SLAVE YARDS
NAJWA BIN SHATWAN (tr. Nancy Roberts)
Syracuse University Press
$24.95 trade paper, $14.95 Kindle, available now

Special Offer—Save 40% off all literature in translation with discount code 05FALL24 now through October 15, 2024.

Rating: 4* of five

Save 40% off on direct-from-publisher purchases of all literature in translation with discount code 05WIT25 now through September 15, 2025.

The Publisher Says: Set in late nineteenth-century Benghazi, Najwa Bin Shatwan's powerful novel tells the story of Atiqa, the daughter of a slave woman and her white master. We meet Atiqa as a grown woman, happily married with two children and working. When her cousin Ali unexpectedly enters her life, Atiqa learns the true identity of her parents, both long deceased, and slowly builds a friendship with Ali as they share stories of their past.

We learn of Atiqa's childhood, growing up in the "slave yards," a makeshift encampment on the outskirts of Benghazi for Black Africans who were brought to Libya as slaves. Ali narrates the tragic life of Atiqa's mother, Tawida, a black woman enslaved to a wealthy merchant family who finds herself the object of her master's desires. Though such unions were common in slave-holding societies, their relationship intensifies as both come to care deeply for each other and share a bond that endures throughout their lives.

Shortlisted for the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Bin Shatwan's unforgettable novel offers a window into a dark chapter of Libyan history and illuminates the lives of women with great pathos and humanity.

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

My Review: What a horrible life slaves have always led.

There's an earth-shattering insight for you. I can't believe anyone didn't say it before me, can you? Well, this book's like that. It's not telling you anything that you didn't know before. It's making you feel, see, smell it instead of intellectually knowing. Slavery, at its heart, is about bodies. The thing we take for granted, the autonomy of the corpus delicti of our lives as sinners on this, gawd's private torture grounds, is abrogated; no man controls his labor, no woman her womb, no child its curiosity. A slave exists, doesn't live. A slave possesses nothing, not even a soul, or else no religion would allow the practice. No religion has ever, to the best of my knowledge, forbidden slavery. At best a few wild-eyed bizarro outlier sects like the Quakers, or the Northern Baptists in the US, could even be bothered to protest its wrongness.

Many were the slaves who had forgotten the story of their enslavement and had integrated gladly into the life of those owned by Muslim masters. As for those who married other members of their own race and, in some cases, won emancipation, they were delivered from hunger to hunger, and from poverty to poverty.

That is a sad and eternal truth: Poverty closely resembles slavery, and as poverty is entirely curable, that cannot be an accident. It suits the people at the top to keep the system just unfair and evil enough that they can keep the best for themselves and run the lowest risk of the huge majority figuring out that they can't kill *all* of us and rebelling.

I hope to High Hallack that the US is at such an inflection point right now. But I digress.

At any rate. The Slave Yards tells a story, fairly simple in its outlines, about Atiqa growing herself up in Benghazi's Slave Yards, suffering multiple orphanings, and growing into a woman with a loving family, both made and born. Into that world comes a man with secrets to tell her about her past, secrets she buried during the worst night of her entire existence, and proofs that she was not just a slave girl and never had to be one. Too late, of course, to prevent the slave girl from suffering the degradation of not even owning the lungs she breathed with.

But Atiqa, the self-made therefore self-possessed woman of the story, doesn't come to this knowledge simply or directly. The whole novel is, as the title suggests, the Slave Yards whole and entire, its incredibly rich culture, its appalling degrading poverty, its joys and hates and endings and beginnings. The stories Atiqa remembers, tells herself anew, feels and smells again in her hard-earned, richly merited new life, are the meat of this book. Maybe "meat" isn't the word...the asida in the bazeen of this book. The story is dispensed with for long stretches of tale-spinning, of life-living memories. And that is a good, good thing.

I felt as though I had gone completely away from 2020 Long Island and its existential anxieties, thence to gain perspective:

Without a word {the groom} handed the bride's uncle a blood-spattered white sheet. The uncle...took it out to a group of men gathered in front of the house. This done, he gleefully set about emptying the contents of his shotgun into the air. ... The uncle unfurled it like a victory banner, the battle of innocence now won...they could hold their heads high in the knowledge that their honor was intact.

The present-day abortion-rights battles are the not-distant descendents of this kind of complete and utter idiocy. The entirety of monotheistic religion's thrust (please pardon wordplay) has been to stand on the neck of Womankind's autonomy out of anxiety. What? Anxious manhood? Perish forbid, say the abortion-deniers, and throw a thousand words into the void between their fears and the actual world. (THEIR daughters, white as snow, will always be able to get abortions...multiple women I'm related to had them pre-Roe-v-Wade. We're white. Connect the dots.) The real issue is control. The real issue is covering up for the men's fear of being robbed of their control over women's bodies:

Nobody seemed to notice that there was something wrong with the custom of having the groom use his hand {to break the woman's hymen} on the wedding night to determine whether his bride was a virgin. On the contrary, even the women thought is was perfectly normal. It had never occurred to them that it was just a way of covering up for a man's possible impotence.

Huh. Imagine that, a custom arising (you should forgive) to protect a fragile boy-ego at the expense of a woman. My pearls, my pearls.

So for a moment, I was swept into a world where the power imbalances made no smallest effort to hide themselves. It was a relief, in a way, to be in a place where the crushing and cruelty were open and acknowledged; were simply the way things are. Because to fight the way things are is to crusade, to smash and shatter and slaughter the old, the bad, but the *known* and the *open* awfulnesses. Today it is harder by far to protect gains not evenly spread, to defend boundaries set to deliberately disadvantage some, and then work to spread and reset them. The world of Benghazi in the 1890s, the 1900s was bitter to be Black in, and the wrongness of it was everywhere. To root out racism in the richest country on Earth? The battle never ends, the rebellion is bought and undermined and softened and, in the end, prevented from making changes that discomfit the wealthy.

Better to be somewhere else, then, even for four hours. To be, however temporarily:

...the legacy of those who didn't look at their dead, who closed their eyes so that they wouldn't see death's cruelty, leaving them open just enough to let their tears escape. I'm the plant that was watered by those tears.

Instead I look with horrified eyes at the photos of Emmett Till https://tinyurl.com/y53q9w9s or videos of fucking racist pigs https://tinyurl.com/y272hvz3
and think, "slavery? what the hell's the difference between that and this?"
and I have no answer for myself.

THE RIVALS & OTHER STORIES, a first-ever translation of Jonah Rosenfeld's stories from Yiddish by Rachel Mines

THE RIVALS & OTHER STORIES
JONAH ROSENFELD (tr. Rachel Mines)
Syracuse University Press
$24.95 trade paper, available now

Save 40% off on direct-from-publisher purchases of all literature in translation with discount code 05WIT25 now through September 15, 2025.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A major literary figure and frequent contributor to the Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts from the 1920s to the mid-1930s, Jonah Rosenfeld was recognized during and after his lifetime as an explorer of human psychology. His work foregrounds loneliness, social anxiety, and people's frustrated longing for meaningful relationships—themes just as relevant to today's Western society as they were during his era.

The Rivals and Other Stories introduces nineteen of Rosenfeld's short stories to an English-reading audience for the first time. Unlike much of Yiddish literature that offers a sentimentalized view of the tight knit communities of early twentieth-century Jewish life, Rosenfeld's stories portray an entirely different view of pre-war Jewish families. His stories are urban, domestic dramas that probe the often painful disjunctions between men and women, parents and children, rich and poor, Jews and Gentiles, self and society. They explore eroticism and family dysfunction in narratives that were often shocking to readers at the time they were published.

Following the Modernist tradition, Rosenfeld rejected many established norms, such as religion and the assumption of absolute truth. Rather, his work is rooted in psychological realism, portraying the inner lives of alienated individuals who struggle to construct a world in which they can live. These deeply moving, empathetic stories provide a counterbalance to the prevailing idealized portrait of shtetl life and enrich our understanding of Yiddish literature.

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

My Review: I'll bet good hard cash, my own United States dollars, that you've never heard of Jonah Rosenfeld. Yiddish-language literature is, to be frank, a specialist taste; a lot of it is what we used to call "schmaltzy," that is to say greased down with lots and lots of chicken fat. The implication being that Yiddish-speaking people, or Jews as we call them now, were all about Mammele and her iron grip on her boychik the melamed. (Not Rabbi, that's the Everest of stereotypical Jewish Motherhood.) Old-fashioned stuff meant to amuse the Old Country immigrant audience that New York City had in abundance while Rosenfeld was writing here (1921–1944).

Are you still here? Did you click away already? Because that's not what Jonah Rosenfeld delivers (mostly)! Lost in a haze of his largely forgotten mother tongue compounded with increasing assimilationist pressures on the now-third-generation immigrants after World War II and the Holocaust, Author Rosenfeld fell into an unjust desuetude. He was wildly popular among his direct contemporaries because he was emphatically not going to feed you pap, as Translator Miner tells us:

In his search for psychological veracity, Rosenfeld does not flinch from the darker side of human nature. Indeed, the psyche's darkest corners are central to his writing. He is, according to Harry (Hillel) Rogoff:
"{A} painter of sadness, grief, fear and horror...a portrayer of love, passion and lust in their decadent stages, when they approach degeneracy...but the keynote of realism is never missing."

His stories are every bit as tough to read as the much-younger Simenon's romans durs, or Erskine Caldwell's realism by way of rage and misery. The pace of interwar societal change informs the need in these (among so many others) writers' careers to explore the rough edges that more mainstream writers don't touch, or don't grab hold of at least, in order to elicit something in a reader that she doesn't necessarily want to offer: Empathy.

{Rosenfeld's} writings, like those of many of his contemporaries, are set in the context of rapidly changing Jewish culture. Urbanization, emigration, increasing social mobility, and pressures to assimilate provide the locus of conflict for many of his characters, whose personal isolation "becomes a metaphor for the rupture and dislocation resulting from the breakup of traditional Jewish values." (footnoted to Schwartz, "The Trials of a Yiddish Writer in America," 196.) Even religion provides little comfort in many of Rosenfeld's stories, whose characters practice rituals devoid of meaning. Jews are caught in a no-man's-land, not truly sustained by Judaism, yet not in harmony and ease with their Gentile neighbors either.

Like his age cohort of writers, the Modernists like Ford Madox Ford (his near contemporary in age) and Ernest Hemingway, the joys of sentimentalism are foregone in Rosenfeld's work. He spares no thought for the warm glow of a loving, crowded hearth; I suspect the fact that he was ejected from his family, essentially sold into slavery (well, apprenticeship anyway) at thirteen, plays some part in his career-spanning unwillingness to write cheery little vignettes of The Old Country:

It is true {writes Translator Miner} that Rosenfeld neglects or subverts much of what was positive in Jewish life, especially in his treatment of family relationships. His domestic dramas, however, serve as a corrective to the tendency of American {Yiddish-language} readers to sentimentalize a Jewish world that no longer exists.

And please note that the audience Author Rosenfeld wrote for was not a small one: Twenty (20!) volumes of short stories; two full-length novels; a dozen plays. This was a culture that was intensely literary, and spawned a lot of theatrical legends, arguably reaching apotheosis on Broadway with 1960s shows like Fiddler on the Roof and Milk and Honey. As Author Rosenfeld's plays are as yet untranslated, I can't state this as fact, but I strongly suspect that his plays show clearly he'd've shuddered at those sentimental shows. This was a man whose first forty years were spent in places that hated him for what he was born as, a Jew. He was a deeply unhappy man. He had no illusions about the comforts of home or the love of family. He was, in short, me! This is why I enjoyed reading these stories so much. I was communing with my bygone, cynical, angry self. And it felt just fine, thanks.

As is my habit, I will now address each story's merits (or lack thereof) using the Bryce Method, going tale-by-tale through all nineteen of them offering my take.

The Rivals documents a man's descent from depression into madness. Meyer is completely useless; his wife, the grudging breadwinner, resents feeding him; his oldest daughter is just adult enough to resent his uselessness without any empathy to balance her rage. A death, a departure, endings all around...rival father leaves the field to rival daughter. He won't survive long. He knows it, too. A bitter taste of family agony to whet one's appetite. 4 stars

A Fleeting Romance is the most frustrating, annoying tale in human history: JUST. TALK. TO. EACH. OTHER! Young, class-conscious Mayer lives with his brother's growing young family in Feygl's family home. Mayer works as a woodcarver for his brother's business; Feygl's warm, kind, accepting family Own Property. Feygl, to the reader, is Interested in the utterly besotted Mayer; but we meet the pair as she escorts a visiting cousin to the train station at the end of a visit, and Mayer's obsessive jealous self follows them:

He stopped in his tracks. People walking in either direction on the narrow sidewalk kept bumping into him. He stood there like a fifth wheel in the middle of the street, in the middle of the bright, sunny weekday that had nothing to do with him but belonged to all those other people who were in the business of doing absolutely nothing and making money in the process.

He is so obsessed with his silly childish ideas about what others think of him that he goes into agonies about having agonies:

Was she about to get married? Was she about to not get married? Or was she not even about to not get married?

Anyone who's ever been in First Love relates to that...but of absolute course, being Mayer and a victim of the lowest possible self-esteem, when push comes to shove and he's in sight of his goal of really talking to her...two years! Two long years! He's wild for her.... 5 stars

At Sunrise is a first-person tale from Humbert Humbert's Jewish cousin. Deeply squicky, not one I ever want to read again! 3 stars because, like Lolita, the language is lovely if the story is not.

The Lodger follows Leah, an old maid of twenty-five, a well-set-up girl from a respectable family, as she grows weary of the burden of being single. She and her mother decide to use the old take-in-a-lodger stratagem, and angrily drive off unsuitable applicants for their spare room. Then...The Lodger arrives. But isn't remotely interested in Leah. Until one night...

It was a warm, dark night—one of those summer nights that promises everything and gives nothing—it offers but then disappoints. ... But the night! The warm, tranquil night wordlessly called out to life, and standing in that silent darkness, hearing that call, Leah wavered. She knew exactly what she wanted...she had to go in to him, he had to explain what he'd done...but no, she couldn't...she'd just knock at his door and tell him to walk more quietly, he was keeping her parents awake...
Leah stood hesitating while the lodger paced faster and faster inside his room, a jittery nerve vibrating in the body of the night. Leah strained to listen. Each footstep, like a restless echo, reverberated inside her. Every instinct told her she had to do something, go to him, but she didn't trust herself. Only her will held her back.

Have you ever in your life read a better evocation of sheer animal lust? And, as the Urge swells to almighty proportions, Leah begins to sing.

The ending is as cruel and horrible a trick as fate can play on anyone whose lust, whose love, is spurned. 4.5 stars

Reb Dovid recounts the evening of a spinster daughter's life, her world on hold because her father (the sarcastically yclept Reb of the title) is shiftless and won't (can't?) provide a dowry for her to marry. His little bits of money come from saying the prayers for dead people, for being the community's memory for the departed in their cemetery, and the days then are all spent in shul praying:

It was as if he'd been created only to demonstrate that you can have a wife and children and still live a solitary life: a peaceful life, a life without worries, without the bother of making a living.

Since his sons, younger than his daughter, are hungry and ambitious, they start a laundry that also employs the spinster sister since she doesn't want to marry, couldn't afford to if she wanted to, and is "too...":

Well, we certainly can believe that {she} also admitted that she was too arrogant, and of course too never serves a person well.

She is finally goaded into action when her father, after yet another day away from his family contributing nothing to their survival, gives her a ripe pear as he breezes past her on the enclosed porch. Something about that carelessly kind act, a father feeding his daughter a treat, catalyzes a lifetime of purposeless existence. Final actions are taken to the tune of El Maleh Rakhamim, a sad tuneful prayer for a dead person. 4 stars

What Happened to the Old Man? scared me.

Somewhere in the still-aware depths of his mind thoughts leaped like cold toads. He was dead. Death was something that beat with a rush of wings. It was familiar, yet frighteningly strange. It was alive, but it lived with an unliving life: it lived with death.

I'll give it 4.5 stars because it was so very, very eerie and uncanny.

Three Women details the miseries of longing for something but never being sure just what; when you're about to plump for one of your options, it's not appealing or something isn't working or you just don't want it after all:

He looked at Judith's pretty, aristocratic-looking face, and it bothered him that he didn't love her.
"Why don't I love you?" He handed her his walking stick. "Take this, hit me!" So Judith, with outward good humor, stuck out her lower lip and whacked him over the arms and shoulders as hard as she could. Meyer bore the blows without protest. Suddenly Judith made a silly face and asked how he could prove he loved her. He didn't get what she meant but just looked at her...

Then an irrevocable choice is made, a violent act perpetrated and Fate's trap springs...on thin air.... 4 stars

Manka is an unusual name, meaning "left-handed" as well as a derivative of the Hebrew name "Miriam," a name of many disputed meanings...most appropriate here is likely "bitter sea."

His glances aren't sexual, though Manka still doesn't like them. Even more repulsive are the flirtatious eyes of the guests, eyes that burn and tear at her everywhere she goes.
–and–
She feels their silence devouring her; she feels their thoughts devouring her, their eyes penetrating deeply into her hidden female places...she wants to run, hide, bury herself and her good looks somewhere far away; she wants to armor herself in ice, so their stares won't dirty her clean body.

What can be worse that being reduced to value of face, demoted from being taken at face value even, dropped into a well of lust that can not be deflected or declined, only ignored? Ignorance of what, exactly, it is these men who receive her food service want isn't on, the girl is afraid to touch her own body with her own hands because she has been so traumatized by undisguised and unashamed lust that she fears the hands, as she thinks of them, her own hands she thinks of as "the hands," think on that for a minute!, will violate her.

A fearsome and fierce story of the damage we do without even considering that an action could be damaging. 4.5 stars

The Four shows how different things are now from 120+ years ago. The little girl's jealous rivalry with the sister old enough to be her mother, the complaisance of the mother around the old man's creepin' on the little girl; the old man desiring the older sister; all of it very much what happens in life but amazingly honest for its time...not a little shocking now, all that borderline pedophilia. Uneasy reading.

The little girl touched his moustache with one finger, making a face: "Eee, your moustache is all wet!" She promptly scrubbed at his moustache with her good holiday apron while the portly gentleman, melting with delight, held still for her. When she was done the kissed, and he congratulated her on her birthday; then, taking her arm, he put it behind her back and fastened something around it. A moment later, seeing the bracelet of silver coins encircling her wrist, she gleefully jumped up, hugged his neck, and clunf to it while he carried her twice around the room.

That wouldn't fly in today's world! Also in this story I came across a very deft piece of infodumping, the way these stories are not only translated from Yiddish but from shtetl culture:

"Come, Madame Thimble!" {the old man} teased {the older sister}, referring to the young heroine of a popular Yiddish play.

How would you go about explaining Betty Rubble to a Martian reader? I think Translator Miner did a bang-up job. 4.5 stars

Mazel Tov makes a life-changing decision's painful, and long-lasting, consequences crystal clear. Author Rosenfeld knew, intimately, a woman or some women who had abortions. He understood the loss, the agony of body and mind, and the complexity of the inevitably unavailable man in this transitional time. The title is the cruelest, most callous joke I've ever read. 4 stars for packing a wallop in a few words.

A Holiday makes the high psychic cost of living among people who aren't your own so plain it hurts. Pesach bleeds into Paska, Passover to Easter, and there's nothing more deadly to a working person than an enforced vacation. Call it a holiday, Holy Day, and it somehow becomes worse. The worker and his daughters aren't getting anything spiritual out of the holy days. They sense the Easter crowds enjoying their holy day...but it's only the loud, clanging bells and the excitement of being in a crowd that's excited about the same thing you are. And the Jews in the story? They're left out. They are aside, apart, away from the crowds even when the daughters seek out the excitement of the midnight Mass. Bitter sadness, emptiness, and religious fidelity...sound, feel, deaden. 3.5 stars

The Inheritance recalls the grisly, grim, painful origin of the oldest-son-of-ten's enduring inheritance from his dead father. A depressing vignette meditating on the costs of emigration on parents, children, and families. 3.5 stars

Just One of Those Stories says it all in the title: Apprentice Motl loves his boss, macher Reb Mayer Cohen (follow the links! the words are important clues) and his boss's daughter who has a limp. He's nobody much, a good son and a good apprentice but not from Reb Mayer's social class. But the limp, now, the family will have to adjust their expectations from a prospective match because the limp...and then, as Rosenfeld usually does to us, the twist and the sting in the tail. This time it's so unexpected that I actually burst out laughing. 4 stars

Yet strangely, despite the feeling of insignificance, he felt important too, because he was about to begin working in this firm that was so enormous it made him feel insignificant; that sense of insignificant importance (or was it important insignificance?) made him feel even bigger than his father.

The trademark Jonah Rosenfeld sentence...play with the idea of the words, the word order, the sentence structure to fully mine the meaning of a thought. He was bloody brilliant at it. That one's just short enough for me to retype without getting RSI.

Francisco tells the tale of Avrom Moysheh the innkeeper's titular goyishe servant, his shrew of a daughter, and a ridiculous vendetta she has against the poor, slow man. She doesn't even know why she's making the man miserable...if he is, we're told he's not bright and doesn't act offended by anything except the woman insulting him in Yiddish instead of Polish, assuming he won't understand her, the nerve!...until, one fine morning, things come to a bitter, bitter head. 3.5 stars because I think the resolution is disproportionate to the stimulus.

Who Would Have Known? announces the end of the world for Reyzel Blackstone, emigrant to the Land of Milk and Honey called America, in the form of a letter from the Old Country. A husband she didn't love, doesn't love, and a long-ago barely-even-acquaintance collide. No couple ever has the same relationship at the same time, marriages wouldn't last under that strain. But the past, the shared past of two people who know each other for years, that isn't the same past the same way a marriage isn't the same for each person in it. And Reyzel Blackstone fucks her whole life up by assuming, after twenty years or more with the same man!, that he is on the same page that she is! How dimwitted can you be! So now what does Mr. Blackstone, the one who kisses, do but start thinking...fatal! never, ever think about what your wife is thinking, husbands!...and wondering and then, finally, doing the stupidest thing of all: Asking questions he really doesn't want the answers to. The end. I mean that literally: The. End. 5 stars, far and away my favorite story in the collection.

Who Are You? made me angry, silly petulant stupidity writ fatal, not worthy of the rest of these stories, not deep enough to make more than a sensation instead of giving rise to an emotion. What a putz that vain young man is! The girl's no prize either, with her coy little waffle to hide her interest in the fine young manimal. Yeccchhh. 2 stars

The Outcast makes intergenerational violence ever so painfully clearly The Problem With The World. Heavy-handed, tendentious, overdone; not wrong, not factually incorrect, but grisly and hard to read. The ending is box-stock Freudian stuff, the kind we've largely realized isn't as simple, as if-then as once supposed. Not particularly stylistically interesting, either. 3 stars

In A Crowded Place traces the birth, burgeoning, and death of a young woman on the subway's passionate attachment to a stranger who comes to sit beside her. She pulls out all the stops, really plays that organ in the soundtrack of her mental soap opera (did I ever just date myself!); she imagines herself in multiple relationships with him, and then their affair comes to its natural end as he gets off the train...with another girl. Oh the agony! It was funny, fun, and really goofy. I suppose the ultimate point of the story is to make anomie and loneliness real, to show their dark results on a real person. I enjoyed the surface levels more than the psychology, though Author Rosenfeld's chops are such that one experience doesn't necessitate the other, one can actually choose the level of response while seeing them all. It's incredibly difficult to do! 3.5 stars

Here's the Story taught me a word I never knew the meaning of before, thank goodness, or I'd've had to be really, really rude to someone I know's brother: shegetz, a nasty way to call someone Jewish a faker, a person ashamed of and hiding his Jewishness. It's used here in the plural, shkotzim, as well; I hadn't known that concept even existed. Well, water under the creaky old bridge.

The story introduces us to a Gentile, Semyon, whose Yiddish is flawless but whose heart isn't Jewish. Jonah Rosenfeld, our narrator, doesn't realize he knows Semyon until some words remind him of the young scalawag this now-grown labor activist was. It was fun to hear the author talk about his (most likely) fictionalized self, and to have him introduce us to the world he left alongside the world he's in now as a Yiddish-language writer. As always, misunderstandings come between young couples. Semyon doesn't want Jonah to leave the city, they're a good double act as the Writer and the Reader of Tales; Jonah doesn't want to stay and watch Semyon get kudos for the work he creates but Semyon embodies. And the girl? She's there to hide the evident real attraction is between Semyon and Jonah. Given the times, of course that can't be said aloud. I expect most readers wouldn't see that facet but it could not possibly be more plain. 4 stars

GAIA, QUEEN OF ANTS is a rollicking good, weird, uncomfortable time

GAIA, QUEEN OF ANTS
HAMID ISMAILOV (tr. Shelley Fairweather-Vega)
Syracuse University Press
$19.95 trade paper, available 13 December 2019

Save 40% off on direct-from-publisher purchases of all literature in translation with discount code 05WIT25 now through September 15, 2025.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From Uzbek author-in-exile Hamid Ismailov comes a dark new parable of power, corruption, fraud, and deception. Ismailov narrates an intimate clash of civilizations as he follows the lives of three expatriates living in England. Domrul is a young Turk with vague and painful memories of ethnic strife in the Uzbekistan of his childhood. His Irish girlfriend Emer struggles with her own adolescent trauma from growing up in war-torn Bosnia. Domrul is the caretaker for Gaia, the eighty-year-old, powerful wife of a Soviet party boss with a mysterious past.

One of Ismailov’s few novels written in Uzbek, Gaia, Queen of Ants offers a rare portrait of a complex and little-known part of the world. A plot centered on political corruption and ethnic conflict is punctuated with Sufi philosophy and religious gullibility. As Ismailov’s characters grapple with questions of faith, power, sex, and family, Gaia, Queen of Ants presents a moving tale of universal themes set against a Central Asian backdrop in the twenty-first century.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED A DRC FOR REVIEW VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Corruption is universal, I suppose we can now agree. Politics and power corrupt innocents and attract the corrupt. Purity fetishists would do well to contemplate what their insistence on viewing all signs of corruption in a person wielding or seeking power costs, as well as being utterly unhelpful, bordering on destructive, in seeking a government. Then there is Gaia Mangitkhanova, the central powerful figure of the novel; she is Kali, the destroyer-to-create-again goddess of Hindu myth; she is also Gaia, Greek goddess of Creation, who parted Chaos to summon all order and logic into being. These divinities use their femaleness, their existence as sexual as opposed to unsexed divinities, to create and to destroy entire races; Gaia (or Goia, as we also learn to think of her) is very explicitly made in their mold.

We meet her in the lift of her geriatric-care home in Eastbourne, a new-by-English-standards resort town on the Sussex coast that's near Brighton. Like many seaside towns, Eastbourne houses a lot of the elderly who are waiting for God to notice them again...to die, that is...and among them was Friedrich Engels. You know, the codifier of Communism, together with that other German fellow...what was his name...well, anyway, here's Gaia:

Bringing with it the smell of mouse, the lift came for her, moving as ponderously as the old folk it carried. Old Lady Gaia pressed the G button and peered into the mirror. Her hair stuck out in clumps, and her eyelids were swollen. But what really broke her heart was that her mustache had thickened.

Her carer, here in the England of today, is Domrul. He is an Uzbeki refugee, whose childhood there was blighted by inexplicable (to him) agonies of threat and loss. His aunt carried him to the safety of England with a few stops in between, Istanbul and Cyprus among them. England accepted the family, and Domrul is now a thirtyish British citizen. Let's meet him:

He knew he was a very patient and tolerant person, but still, as he descended in that malodorous lift ride from the heavens to the earth, from the distant tongue of his childhood a curse came to him. F... yes fuck her, even if she is a begum!
Angels bless both good words and bad, as they say, and this absolute shame indeed came to pass in their second meeting.

Author Ismailov, Uzbeki political refugee and banned writer, is a deeply cruel person. Domrul's young life is about to go totally out of control again, and just when his prospects were looking up. He's floated through life meeting amazing people, about whom he feels as Forrest Gump is presented as feeling: "Oh, there you are, hi and welcome." He has had menial jobs, as an immigrant to England will have had, as well as been the darling of some powerful older peoples' lives. His bosses and his gurus have led him on a meandering path that culminates at the door of Gaia Mangitkhanova. It is here that this Turkic Uzbeki exile to the rainy cold of England will gain the energy to rocket home to Uzbekistan, to find the woman he thinks he loves, Emer the evangelical, and rescue her from imprisonment in the underworld of...

But you know...the story is best left for you to experience, its digressive and discursive style is less suited to a recapitulation or a review than it is to experiencing it directly, engaging with its storytelling and its layered meanings left to you to pick apart. The novel's charm, and it is plentifully endowed with charm, is in its voices. The storyteller, the novel itself, has a voice that breaks the fourth wall to address the reader in a conspiratorial first-person plural "we." I very often inveigh against that usage; here it felt appropriate, almost inevitable. Myths aren't best told at a narratorial remove. They're shared experiences of power and its victims, they're cries of outrage and triumph and unbearable, peak feelings. Domrul's young, virile body servicing Gaia's cronehood in body and in soul is a cruel and horrible perversion of lust's purpose: Connection to the Other is not easily attained but the shortest route is through the sexual acts—and what connection worth the name can be made between spent ending and burgeoning middle?

It will disturb some readers to know that Gaia exerts power over Domrul, her literal servant, in sexual terms. But think of the myths, the root stories of all cultures. Think of the Mother Goddesses who create all things and then, somehow, have husbands...modern squeamishness elides the glaringly obvious fact: Mother beds son. Goddess enfolds creation in her sacred body. Gaia fucks Domrul, and in the process, sets her life into a crystalline clarity of pattern. Remember, when you're reading these squirmy uncomfortable scenes, to contextualize the actions Gaia and Domrul take in mythic not quotidian terms. Goia Mangitkhanova is Gaia Calligeneia, the Maker of Good, the Good Mother of All. In the generative process, she creates Domrul to destroy him. In the process of creation, she carries the meaning of the novel in her vagina: Creation and destruction, joy and shame, sex and birthing, are sides of a coin that we all must use to pay the ferryman at the end.

This is very much a novel about endings, about the end of life, about how to end the agony that is emptiness. I disliked the character Emer most strongly. She is an evangelical christian and she is an utter void of a being. Her trajectory is tragic, but to me it felt more satisfying than pathetic, evoking pathos that is. Her last act in the book isn't credible, at least not to me; Domrul is the focus of it, and that takes away the power of her presence as the young Gaia-Creatrix. It is a sour note from a sour person, and I was expecting better of her story. But that was the last of my woes while reading. (There are far too many w-bombs dropped in this book, as seems to be a developing norm in litrachure. This cartoonish means of expressing...what? what is expressed in a wink that can't and shouldn't be expressed in another way?...must die in fire.) The other stories, of Gaia and Domrul, end in ways much less simple. They feel, therefore, more satisfying, more the thing the reader earned by confronting the uncomfortable use of sex as metaphor for destruction. This is where the story was meant to go. That it reaches the harbor, not a safe one, of the divine destruction wreaked on Gaia and Domrul together, is a satisfying payoff to a complex and unsettling journey.

Translator Fairweather-Vega is to be praised for her fidelity to the structure of a myth. She didn't impose a spurious order on her words, she clearly felt the power of this story and went to the full extent of her powers to render its soul in English prose. She had, I must surmise, more trouble with the baxshis' poetry-cum-songs (a baxshi is more or less a bard, the book tells us), as the inevitable complexity of expressing in poetry what prose is purported to be unable to carry weighs her efforts down:

A drunken nightingale took this road,
a land of flowers it found,
On it went with a flower,
goblets and good cheer did abound.

Finally it spoke the truth; in my ear I heard the sound,
Saying the sorrow was gone now,
but still no peace could be found.

Okay. Well. That's just perfectly corking, isn't it. It's not *bad* per se, but it's not something I'd seek a lot more of. That cavil aside, I encourage y'all to seek out the novel and to explore the end, the ending, and the process of ending a pattern.