Safe Return Doubtful

Translated by Orr Scarf

I’ve been slow reading this award winning Hebrew novel, the recently published translation of which (from <i>Orr Scharf</i>) will surely gain more accolades. There are a few words to check the meaning of, fortunately just by highlighting them on the eReader, but chiefly because after only a few pages I realised how good it was, and I wanted to savour it.

This is a lavish and enchanting novel of adventure, an old-fashioned type of story telling that is rarely seen in a novel these days. Set in what is now Belorus, then, in the late nineteenth century, tsarist Russian, it is the story of a Jewish community, with its powerful sense of loyalty, revenge and family, set against the fizz of revolution, and approaching war.
It begins when a deserted wife appeals for information on her missing husband by advertising in the local newspaper. Mende Speismann sympathises, stories like these are prevolent, her own husband walked out a few months earlier. Cue the introduction of irrepressible Fanny Keismann, known to her neighbours as the ‘beast’, from the work she does alongside her father slaughtering livestock. Though married with children, she leaves in search of her sister’s husband, and so begins a remarkable adventure.
Her story is interspersed with those of several other key characters, all utterly gripping and adding richly to the novel.
Ultimately, what Iczkovits produces is highly relevent and resonant today; of the perils of preconception, and of how the Jewish are viewed, a combination of spiteful threat, vulnerability and yet as a great power.
Most memorably, it is about the ability of people to change. Fanny, once riveted by the “animals’ final twitches” that she slaughtered, becomes the very opposite, a protector of them, and a vegetarian even. The head of the Tsar’s secret police, Colonel Piotr Novak, is introduced as the bad guy with a deeply engraved bigotry toward Jews, but on spending time among them, becomes a totally different man.
This is an exceptional novel, brimming with Jewish cultural references, and jammed as full as a Swiss Roll with irony, satire, witticisms and colourful metaphors. And..it has an appropriately marvellous finale.