Ruchama Johnston-Bloom, who writes about modern Jewish thought and Orientalism. She has a PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago and is the Associate Director of Academic Affairs at the London center ofĚýCAPA: The Global Education Network.

Ěýby Alisa Ganieva, translated from the Russian by Carol Apollonio (Russia, Deep Vellum)

At the beginning of Alisa Ganieva’s Bride and Groom, translated by Carol Apollonio, a group of young people ask an old man for directions to a dacha somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow and end up buying homemade wine from him, after he gives them the following directions: “Go straight down this path, then turn left when you get to the turnstile, before the fence turn again, this time to the right? Got it?” A young man in the group then repeats the salient details of the directions: “Straight, left, right.” After which, “an old net bag appeared out of nowhere, and the man extracted from it a large bottle with a homemade label showing the letter X, the rest indecipherable.” Patya, the bride of Bride and Groom, also among the group, is Dagestani, and so her Moscow friends, with whom she is looking for the dacha (in order to attend a party) assume she will not drink the wine: “She doesn’t drink. That’s how it is in her country . . . Islam. Right, Patya?” Patya does in fact drink, but does not bother correcting her friends, nor does she bother correcting the ludicrous stereotypes some of the people she encounters at the party have regarding people from her region (which they also often misidentify). The party plays out in a surreal fashion, including a séance and an encounter between Patya and Rinat, a sexually menacing figure, who tells Patya of a strange dream he has had, which he interpreted to mean she would attend the party. When Patya refers to someone else at the party as “full of himself,” Rinat asks, “Might Yuri have simply drunk some wine and come to know truth … Unlike us, he doesn’t try to distinguish himself from God.” Rinat then references a poet who declared “I am God!” and whose students, thinking he was possessed by Satan, tried to stab him, but ended up stabbing themselves. Although Patya is scared of Rinat, and thinks he is crazy, at the end of the chapter, when Patya is trying to get outside and the people holding the séance think she is a spirit and will not open the door, Rinat helps her escape, and Patya gives him her hand, stating: “He would not let me stumble.”

This first chapter, suffused with Sufism, vignettes capturing the erasures endured by Russia’s Islamic minorities and complicated gender dynamics touching on selfhood and agency, is a masterful beginning to an intriguing novel. The old man (a Sufi guide, the first of several in the book), who sells Patya and her friends wine, gives directions that imply many different paths—the turnstile, the fence, “turn again”—therefore underscoring the right path, the áą­a°ůīḳa, the Sufi path to God. The wine itself is both another Sufi marker, esoterically pointing the reader toward the tradition of “intoxicated Sufism,” as well as a device to mark the distance between Patya’s true self and how people perceive her. (Wine will also return at the end of the novel, bringing the drunkenness full circle.) The Sufi poet mentioned by Rinat, who loses his individuality in God and therefore comes close to (achieves?) heresy, serves as a foil for Patya, who struggles to preserve her individuality in the face of family and cultural expectations, but also longs to lose it, when she meets Marat, her Groom.

The exoteric plot of the novel follows Patya and Marat, both of whom return to their hometown in Dagestan from Moscow, under pressure from their respective families to marry. Marat’s parents have already booked the reception hall—he just needs to find a bride. Patya’s family has set her up with a succession of potential suitors, but she has rejected them all. When they finally meet, it feels inevitable that they will fall in love, but their families do not approve. Their hometown meanwhile is embroiled in politics and intrigue, hinging on the presence of Salafism and political corruption. Eventually, their marriage is given the go-ahead, but the murder of an old friend of Marat’s, who has declared himself an agnostic, changes the course of events, and the love story dissolves, the esoteric Sufi text coming to the fore. Throughout the novel, a shadowy figure, the local big shot, both mafia boss and Sufi ˛őłó̲˛ą˛â°ě̲łó̲, presides in the background—proof positive that the “functioning system” that Patya declares the people want is nowhere to be seen.

The story is told through chapters that alternate between Patya and Marat. Patya’s chapters are first person, Marat’s chapters third person. The first time the narrative leaps from first to third person (the beginning of the second chapter) is somewhat disorienting, but the pattern soon becomes clear. This choice of voice(s) plays a significant role in how effective the novel is, as it deepens the exploration of gender and selfhood. Marat, as the man, holds much of the power in the relationship, and reading about him in the third person makes him somewhat opaque—like Patya, we wonder about him, and perhaps cannot see him as clearly as we see Patya. The chapters focused on Patya, in contrast, bring us much closer to her, as she traverses familial expectations and her own desires. I am not sure if this dismantles or reinforces the power imbalance, but it invites the reader to think about love within the confines of gender.

Bride and Groom uses a love story to explore the possibilities of selfhood for a young Dagestani woman, to develop an extended Sufi meditation, and to engage with the complex political and cultural realities of contemporary Dagestan. Readers (Americans in particular) would do well to acknowledge what the novel beautifully illustrates: that there are many different Islams, each infused with local particularities, and that it is often impossible to tell truth from heresy, self from other/God, spiritual guide from charlatan.

Ěýby Hanna Krall, translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm (Poland, Feminist Press)

There is a certain amount of fatigue, I think, with Holocaust narratives. People may feel that they already know what to expect, they know the story, they do not need to revisit that world. This despite, or perhaps, because of, the recent which found a significant lack of knowledge about the Holocaust in the United States. Whatever disinterest or trepidation you might feel when faced with the prospect of returning to this horrifying terrain, Chasing the King of Hearts by Hanna Krall, translated by Philip Boehm, is worthy of your attention.

This slim volume (originally published in Polish in 2006) is Krall’s account of the life story of Izolda R., a survivor who spent the war restlessly, relentlessly trying to reunite with her husband. Her single-minded quest sends her throughout occupied Poland, Austria, and Germany, in and out of camps and prisons, and back and forth between passing as a non-Jewish Pole and being hunted as a Jew. The author and the subject clashed over how the story should be told. As Krall has stated, Izolda R. was “sentimental, wordy, emotional, always wanting it bigger. I have always known that the only way to tell such a story is with austerity and great emotional calm, even detachment.” The marriage of Izolda’s almost preposterous true story of survival and Krall’s laconic style gives this book its power, and, of course, draws our attention to the thorny relationship between history, memory, and truth, and between fact and fiction.

With her almost aphoristic approach Krall constructs vignettes that capture Izolda’s scattershot movements throughout the Reich and illustrate how factors like gender, language, and class shaped her experiences. I found Krall’s foregrounding of gender particularly fascinating (it is fitting that the Feminist Press brought this U.S. edition out.) Language is also a compelling through line—particularly Izolda’s inability to fully share her experiences with the younger, Hebrew-speaking generations of her family. And class also—Izolda cannot do the menial tasks she is often required to perform as a prisoner because she never had to do them before the war. When she encounters Austrian Jews being deported, they are convinced they are better than Polish Jews and will therefore be treated better by the Germans.

The vignettes Krall constructs capture the dark truth of the Jewish experience of trying to pass—Izolda recites the Hail Mary perfectly, only to be told an actual Catholic wouldn’t bother to enunciate each word so clearly. They also reveal identity as something both terrifyingly fixed and strangely fluid in the landscape(s) Izolda traverses while trying to find her king of hearts. Jewish women die their hair (Izolda at one point ties a bit of torn-out coat lining around her head to hide her roots), men have surgery to elongate their foreskins, teeth (real and false) are knocked out, false teeth are then removed preemptively ahead of beatings . . . There is ultimately no escape from being Jewish—even after the war she and her husband try to pass and fail, eventually having to leave Poland—but there is also a strange sense that everything is malleable. Old photographs can be doctored; concentration camp numbers can be removed or amended. If there is a “Jewish way” of holding a bag, then there must be a way to learn how to fully inhabit the other, the non-Jew. A way to escape.

The short chapters—from a paragraph or two, to two or three pages long—mostly follow Izolda as she tries to survive the war. However, a series of chapters interspersed throughout the text capture Izolda’s reflections as an elderly woman in Haifa (“Armchair. Everything is Life,” “Armchair. More Urgent Matters”). These chapters reckon with the terrible mathematics of contingency, as in this passage from “Armchair. Credit”:

If they hadn’t taken her for a prostitute, she wouldn’t have stopped in on Mateusz the caretaker,

she wouldn’t have learnt about Mauthausen [her husband’s location],

she wouldn’t have travelled to Vienna.

If she hadn’t gone to Vienna, she would have stayed in Warsaw. She would have died in the uprising, in the basement, together with her mother.

If she hadn’t escaped from Guben, they would have sent her on with the other women.

She would have landed in Bergen-Belsen,

in the middle of a typhus epidemic.

She would have died of typhus together with Janka Tempelhof.

Evidently God had decided she was meant to survive the war.

Or not. He had decided that she was meant to die and she opposed His verdict with all her strength. That’s the only reason she survived. And no God can claim credit. It was hers and hers alone.

Izolda’s journey, mapped by Krall and Boehm, circles back to contingency again and again. How did Izolda survive? Why? Is there any meaning to this survival? Izolda is convinced her love for her husband propelled her forward, but he seems to not fully reciprocate that love, and the love story does not provide much by way of explanation or closure.

Near the beginning of Chasing the King of Hearts, Izolda wants to witness one of the typhus patients she is tending die because she is curious about “what she might see when someone else’s life comes to an end.” She wonders if she will see a sign, “because if there is a sign, it ought to be read.” Izolda continues to look for signs throughout the book: using a pack of cards to help locate her husband, wondering if it is a good omen when she sees someone wearing a sweater like one that belonged to a friend who escaped to Honduras. Chasing the King of Hearts is a book full of signs—signs that it may be impossible to fully interpret, but that we ought to read nonetheless.