Max Gross

Reason Read: Jewish Book Club Dec 2022 read, ROOT
I was happy to read this book this month because it had been on my shelf for awhile. It is a story of a shtetl that was lost in Poland and totally did know that there was a WWII. Their contact with the world disrupts their community but it also results in the world accusing them of faking this and eventually this lost shtetl wishes they had never been found. It's an easy read with exploration of the Yiddish Jews and how culture and contact with the world can come with serious concerns.… (más)

This book offers something that I have yet to find in modern (post-Shoah) Jewish literature: an alternative history that manages to speak to the cruel history of the Holocaust, demonstrate the reality of modern antisemitism, and empower Jewish narratives while also weaving an interesting and entertaining tale. No doubt, I was able to laugh, cry, and smile throughout this novel because of my culturally Jewish upbringing. Many of the punch lines would have likely gone undetected if I did not have a Jewish background. I found this novel to be a true page turner and I genuinely looked forward to getting back to my daily reading.

This being said, I have a few critiques. Firstly, I did find that the plot became a bit unnecessarily complex within the last 100 pages. I was saddened by this because in the first 300 pages, the author had managed to expertly relay a complex story line while remaining coherent and cohesive (ie: the plot had linear movement) but near the end, the plot seemed tangential and frustrated. My second criticism is that for all the attention to accuracy and empowerment paid to the Jewish characters I was dissapointed with the stereotypical portrayal of the Roma characters. I felt that there was really an opportunity missed here to add complexity and depth to the Roma characters. I expect that there will be sequel.

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**SPOILERS**

i don't like to give half-star ratings but i just couldn't decide with this book. it took me so long to get through - half for life reasons but half because it was just so tedious at times. that was a real disappointment; everything i read about this book beforehand suggested it would be right up my alley. and i guess i was part right: i genuinely loved the kreskol narrative, the worldbuilding around kreskol's isolation, the digressions into the rabbis' lives and histories. there were parts of this that hit me hard, just the horrifying & intangible misery of the shoah, of the realities of modern antisemitism.

but for everything that i thought was well-written and deftly handled, there was the absolutely grim pesha and yankel storyline, which had no joy in it for anyone involved, and reinforced some truly frightful stereotypes about women. to the point that there were moments (in particular the fight between the two prostitutes) where i found myself wondering how this got published in the here and now. i just got so tired of this whole narrative and wished i could be back in kreskol. (like, i GET why this was included, but i didn't come here to read about sex trafficking in modern poland!) and the net effect of this was that i soured on yankel, who i had enjoyed so much in the first half of the book, and the final pages of the story had no emotional effect on me. i understood intellectually that this was an emotive ending but i was just like - oh, okay, that's it.

speaking of the modern poland stuff, i truly felt there was more love and detail spent on depicting yankel's experiences of modernity than on kreskol itself. i would have enjoyed it more if the book leant hard into either of those things. i would have loved a book half this length that really focused in on kreskol society. i would have probably enjoyed a story about a guy who is functionally from the past learning how to function in modernity. but by trying to balance these two things, veering wildly back and forth, the lost shtetl lost me. and in the end there was no real closure to either story. which is fine! there's nothing wrong with an open ending! but here, it was just unsatisfying.

there were also a couple really small nitpicky things that broke immersion and ruined my enjoyment of the book. the footnotes for yiddish/hebrew/polish translation were one thing, but was frustrated by the fact that there were footnotes for words that are quite common in american english/yinglish (and therefore easy to google, which i would have done were i not myself a yid.) also the historical footnotes felt like things that could have been elaborated in text very easily, given the narrator's didactic tone. (i did like the narration, in general!)

the other thing that annoyed me was the fact that every single character had a unique name and surname, which i guess is the case in a lot of books, but there were so many characters mentioned in asides that it became really noticeable here. i suppose this was done for ease of identification, but with the sheer volume of side characters and the fact that most of them didn't take up much space in the story, this had the effect of making it all feel rather cluttered. and, really, in a small town like kreskol i'd expect at least five prominent esthers and herschels apiece.

also, for my politics and tastes, this was a little too zionist. but you can totally understand some mythologising of israel for the characters in kreskol - i just wish there'd been more space to actually read about that. idk. largely unsatisfied by this book, which is a huge pity, because there was some real brilliance in here, damped by everything that annoyed me.… (más)