The Dialect of Garlic

It is difficult to read The River Midnight (Scribner; 414 pages; $25), Lilian Nattel's genealogical fantasy of Jewish village life in 19th century Poland, without being reminded of Marc Chagall's romantic paintings: a couple floating over a small town; a midwife holding a newborn; and, of course, the famous green-faced fiddler hovering on a rooftop like a Macy's parade balloon.

Similar images emerge in Nattel's dreamscapes. Like most descendants of East European Jewry, Nattel has a knowledge of her ancestry only a few generations deep. Blaszka, then, is a fictional place where the Canadian author attempts to link emotionally and spiritually with her unknown forebears. Like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County and Garcia Marquez's Macondo, Nattel's imagined backwater is shot through with mythic significance. Even the river of the novel's title surges with the metaphorical force of Mother Ganges.

But it is the brilliantly patterned minutiae of daily life, the rewards of Nattel's research, that anchor the novel's loftier meanings. At muddy street level, Blaszka is stuck in poverty and provincial darkness. Typhus, cholera and rampaging Cossacks periodically cut down the defenseless population. Czarist laws keep Blaszka's youth from a modern formal education. But so do Orthodox parents who pray that their sons will devote themselves to Talmudic study and their daughters will aim no higher than the kitchen stove and the marriage bed.

Not unexpectedly, the author sees this setting as a sorry patriarchy of ineffectual husbands and resentful wives. "The day after your wedding, when your mother cuts your hair off, that's your life falling on the floor," a matron tells a bride-to-be. Nattel's women get not only the saltiest lines but also the feistiest roles. Childless Hanna-Leah, the butcher's wife, is freed from disappointment by an ecstatic vision and demands that her husband share the housework. Faygela, poet-mother of five, travels to Warsaw, where she encounters a circle of secular Jewish intellectuals and renounces Yiddish as "the dialect of garlic." Years later, one of Faygela's daughters converts to the new heresies of Darwin and Marx, and is arrested for distributing radical pamphlets. Another daughter interprets Little Red Riding Hood as a unionist parable: "She goes on strike, and the big, bad boss has no choice, he has to give her grandmother her pay."

Humor and broad empathies cushion the obviousness of Nattel's feminist subtext. So does her supple narrative technique, which weds the discipline of scholarship with artistic license. The River Midnight is inspired matchmaking. What a critic wrote after seeing a 1916 Chagall exhibition could be said of Nattel's Blaszka: "That this 'Jewish hole' [Chagall's term for his birthplace], dirty and smelly, with its winding streets, its blind houses and its ugly people, bowed down by poverty, can be thus attired in charm, poetry and beauty...this is what enchants us and surprises us at the same time."