For anyone seeking a historical novel that “takes you there,” this will be your book. Jewish life and traditions at the turn of the 20th century are re-created with depth and fullness, from the bathhouses of Kishinev to the sweatshops of the Lower East Side, and the varied social movements to improve labor conditions (and the pushback from employers). There Gutke and her partner become role models of a sort for Chava, a teenager awakening to her love for another young woman.

Years later, they meet up again while traveling to Odessa, and finally once more amid the teeming working-class immigrant community on New York’s Lower East Side. Their paths cross several times, firstly at Chava’s birth Gutke is the woman who delivers her. Unlike most tales of immigration, the novel devotes about equal time to their lives in Europe and the United States. The sentiment could also reflect the terrible anti-Semitism they and their families were forced to confront, again and again.īeyond the Pale follows the coming-of-age stories of two women: Chava Meyer, born in 1889 in Kishinev, the capital of Bessarabia (modern Moldova) and Gutke Gurvich, who was brought to the city as a child by her mother a generation earlier, and who grows up to become a talented midwife. The title refers to its heroines’ eventual emigration to America from the Pale of Settlement, the region in western Russia where Jews had been allowed to live since Catherine the Great’s time. It was only $1.99 and had many positive reviews, so I snapped it up. A gallery of autumn historical fiction readsįirst published in 1997, Elana Dykewomon’s Beyond the Pale came to my attention through an email newsletter from its publisher, Open Road, which had reissued the Lambda-award winning historical novel as an ebook in 2013.The Seed Woman by Petra Durst-Benning, a novel of.The Research Journey, a guest post from Barbara Ri.Beyond the Pale by Elana Dykewomon, an immersive j.A visual preview of the winter-spring 2018 season.Time's Betrayal by David Adams Cleveland, a unique.The Revolution of Marina M by Janet Fitch, an epic.Gone Before Christmas by Charles Finch, a short Vi.

In which I read my first Nordic noir: The Shadow D.

Beyond the pale dykewomon