Oct. 3rd, 2012 11:16 pm
Through the Valley of Neath
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muckefuckHalfway through a 500-page novel seems a good point to stop and take stock. After all, had this been one of the last couple books I've read, I'd be done by now. It's another sprawling family novel, this one authored by Bernice Rubens, a Welshwoman of Russian-Jewish descent. Unsurprisingly, it's about a family of Russian Jews who settle in Cardiff--or rather one branch of them do. That's what intrigued me about it, since "Welsh" and "Jewish" are two words I don't hear used together often.
I came across Rubens' name in a list of Welsh writers a while back and put the book on my Wishlist, which is how the GWO ended up buying it for my birthday. On the one hand, it seemed a natural follow-up to a novel about a sprawling Crimean Greek family, but I was disappointed enough by that to think I needed a break, which is how Okorafor slipped in there. But I've been in something of a Welsh mood lately thanks to helping tutor a learner online and it's virtually the only fiction I have with a Welsh setting.
So it's bit ironic there's so little blas Cymreig in it. The Welsh segment takes up only 90 pages--before that it's all about the family's travails in Russia (culminating in the horrors of the Odessa pogrom of 1871) and afterwards the scene shifts to Germany. The other disappointment is that it doesn't seem as well researched as the previous segment (or, given my ignorance of 19th-century Russia, perhaps I should say it doesn't seem strikingly better researched) despite the fact that this is where Rubens should be most in her element.
Granted, it all takes place before she was born, but you'd think she'd've doubled-checked the location of the synagogue she has the family attend (not present in the Cathedral Road location before 1897). Even more inexplicable is her misdating of the explosion at the Universal Colliery in Senghenydd on 14. Oct. 1913, the worst mining accident in UK history. This isn't an event mentioned in the background for added colour either: It marks a turning point for one of the chief characters, who emigrates to Germany as a result. "The years passed," she tells us (at least four, according to the family details supplied) before he returns again and I found myself confused how he could possibly have done so and bewildered that WWI wouldn't merit a mention, only to have her conclude "A year after that visit marked the beginning of the Great War." When does she think that war happened?
Other details of the Welsh interlude don't ring true either. When she had one of her Jewish characters take up a drapery round in the Valleys, I thought it was specifically in order to foreground the pogroms of 1911. These events form the background of the award-winning film Solomon a Gaenor (about a romance between a Welsh girl and a Jewish fabric peddler) and resulted in the virtual elimination of Jewish settlement in Wales outside of metropolitan Cardiff. You'd think an event with that impact on the local Jewish community would merit at least a passing mention, wouldn't you?
Moreover the notion of someone making a living as an itinerant peddler in Senghenydd up until the time of the explosion seems anachronistic at best. Rubens describes it as "a village", but the 1911 census reveals a population of over 11,000 and contemporary photographs show a robust commercial centre. At that point that a man would have to go pretty deep into the boonies to find any customers, but we're expected to believe not only that his round is basically the same as when he started but that it can be productively bequeathed to another newer immigrant.
Now no book of popular fiction is ever going to have enough linguistic details to make me happy, but again one would expect at least a mention of the Welsh language somewhere. Instead, we get only one word of it and it's misused. (You wouldn't simply call someone cariad; it would be gariad [vocative] or 'nghariad [possessed form].) It also seems odd that she would point up the lack of a shared language between two German-born boys and their Yiddish-speaking uncle despite mentioning the commonality between the languages only a hundred pages earlier.
In spite of these flaws, the writing is quite solid and I find myself generally very eager to reach the next chapter--though slightly less so now given the heavy-handed start to the German section. So far, she's been doing a nice job of lamenting the tragedies of history without getting too didactic about them, but I guess the Holocaust is simply too monstrous and too recent for her to keep up that kind of remove. Hopefully I'll still have a lot of good to say about her when I look back over the next 250 pages.
I came across Rubens' name in a list of Welsh writers a while back and put the book on my Wishlist, which is how the GWO ended up buying it for my birthday. On the one hand, it seemed a natural follow-up to a novel about a sprawling Crimean Greek family, but I was disappointed enough by that to think I needed a break, which is how Okorafor slipped in there. But I've been in something of a Welsh mood lately thanks to helping tutor a learner online and it's virtually the only fiction I have with a Welsh setting.
So it's bit ironic there's so little blas Cymreig in it. The Welsh segment takes up only 90 pages--before that it's all about the family's travails in Russia (culminating in the horrors of the Odessa pogrom of 1871) and afterwards the scene shifts to Germany. The other disappointment is that it doesn't seem as well researched as the previous segment (or, given my ignorance of 19th-century Russia, perhaps I should say it doesn't seem strikingly better researched) despite the fact that this is where Rubens should be most in her element.
Granted, it all takes place before she was born, but you'd think she'd've doubled-checked the location of the synagogue she has the family attend (not present in the Cathedral Road location before 1897). Even more inexplicable is her misdating of the explosion at the Universal Colliery in Senghenydd on 14. Oct. 1913, the worst mining accident in UK history. This isn't an event mentioned in the background for added colour either: It marks a turning point for one of the chief characters, who emigrates to Germany as a result. "The years passed," she tells us (at least four, according to the family details supplied) before he returns again and I found myself confused how he could possibly have done so and bewildered that WWI wouldn't merit a mention, only to have her conclude "A year after that visit marked the beginning of the Great War." When does she think that war happened?
Other details of the Welsh interlude don't ring true either. When she had one of her Jewish characters take up a drapery round in the Valleys, I thought it was specifically in order to foreground the pogroms of 1911. These events form the background of the award-winning film Solomon a Gaenor (about a romance between a Welsh girl and a Jewish fabric peddler) and resulted in the virtual elimination of Jewish settlement in Wales outside of metropolitan Cardiff. You'd think an event with that impact on the local Jewish community would merit at least a passing mention, wouldn't you?
Moreover the notion of someone making a living as an itinerant peddler in Senghenydd up until the time of the explosion seems anachronistic at best. Rubens describes it as "a village", but the 1911 census reveals a population of over 11,000 and contemporary photographs show a robust commercial centre. At that point that a man would have to go pretty deep into the boonies to find any customers, but we're expected to believe not only that his round is basically the same as when he started but that it can be productively bequeathed to another newer immigrant.
Now no book of popular fiction is ever going to have enough linguistic details to make me happy, but again one would expect at least a mention of the Welsh language somewhere. Instead, we get only one word of it and it's misused. (You wouldn't simply call someone cariad; it would be gariad [vocative] or 'nghariad [possessed form].) It also seems odd that she would point up the lack of a shared language between two German-born boys and their Yiddish-speaking uncle despite mentioning the commonality between the languages only a hundred pages earlier.
In spite of these flaws, the writing is quite solid and I find myself generally very eager to reach the next chapter--though slightly less so now given the heavy-handed start to the German section. So far, she's been doing a nice job of lamenting the tragedies of history without getting too didactic about them, but I guess the Holocaust is simply too monstrous and too recent for her to keep up that kind of remove. Hopefully I'll still have a lot of good to say about her when I look back over the next 250 pages.
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To be fair, soft mutation is on the way out in vocatives and you will hear cariad nowadays, but my impression is that the situation was different a century ago.