Book Review: ‘Lublin,’ by Manya Wilkinson

LUBLIN, by Manya Wilkinson

Three Jewish village boys go to the big city to sell a box of paintbrushes. … You can’t stop me from telling this one because you haven’t heard it yet, unless you’ve already read Manya Wilkinson’s brilliant new novel, “Lublin.” With its matter-of-fact approach to depicting antisemitic violence, its three guileless main characters and its artful folding-together of fable, history and Jewish joke-making, this is a story for the moment and for the ages.

“Lublin” is Wilkinson’s first novel in more than 30 years, after many plays and radio dramas. Her debut novel, “Ocean Avenue” (1991), was a tragicomic multigenerational story of a Jewish family coming to terms with life after the Holocaust. “Lublin” is far more original, and disarmingly so, from its opening: “The sky is as bright as a polished shoe. Elya has never known a sky like it. Over Mezritsh, the sky is often dark with fumes from the tanneries, smoke, ash, cinders, wood shavings, winged insects, small birds, flying cats, prayers, curses and avenging visions of Adoshem. Here on the open road a lad can breathe.”

It’s late August 1907, in a Polish part of the Russian Empire. Elya, an ambitious schemer, is leaving his stifling small village for the first time. He’s going with two friends, the meek and devout Kiva and Kiva’s cousin, the snarky, crypto-Marxist Ziv. The plan is to walk to bustling Lublin and sell brushes given to them by Kiva’s wealthy businessman uncle, whom Elya emulates. To begin raising himself to that level — maybe even someday moving to America, owning a house and going by Ed — he needs to make some money, which means getting out of the village. Here’s his pitch to his more ambivalent buddies: “We’ll roast food on sticks, stay up all night, laugh when we feel like it, get into mischief, and no one’ll know.”

Three teenagers making a journey on roads used by Cossacks and their horses and dogs: What could go wrong? After all, Lublin is just 100 kilometers from their town. In between, according to the map Elya studies as if it were a Torah scroll, are mythic, mysterious villages named for their most memorable attributes: lakes (or lack of lakes), girls, dead people, fools, prunes, prayers or Russians. This last place, the boys at least know, is “a dangerous place for Jews.”