Recommendations from our site
“This is a book not only about migration, but about storytelling and how people tell the story of their lives. It begins with a kind of fairy tale, of a young Jewish girl in a Latvian forest outside Riga in the early 20th century. She meets what might be fairytale villains, but in fact are young Bolsheviks having a political meeting. It follows the trajectory of this girl, Mina, and of her family. They originally want to emigrate to America but, as with many Eastern European Jewish emigrants of that time, they actually end up in Britain, in Liverpool.
It’s a wonderfully vivid and intense resurrection of the lives of Jewish Liverpudlians through the 20th century, but it’s also about how people and communities change in a society that is perpetually in a state of flux. We see how both the central heroine and her children and grandchildren fare throughout the 20th century, how great social events impact on their lives, but equally how they carve out a space of freedom within those historical pressures. It’s also a very witty book. It’s beautifully observed. It has this wonderful tension between what you might call the fairy story narrative—with its miracles and wonders and transformations and reversals—and the relentless march of history, and the way that those two different types of story sometimes coexist but sometimes diverge.”
