Every single month, I am reading an impressive amount of books and novels with a Jewish topic, young or mature authors, men and female, modern or classical stories, for children, young adults, middle grade or a wider audience. Some are published in English, but also in German, French, Hebrew or Italian. Many relate on topics pertaining to Jewish life, the rift between religious and secular Jews, finding love out of the tribe, longing about a lost home country that will never feel as home, making - or refusing to make - aliyah. There is a comperehensive list of topics that repeat themselves over and over again. Therefore, is there any chance to change and challenge the ways in which Jewish novels are written?
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau by Michael Zapata, that I have access to in audio format narrated by Coral Pena, seems to be an inspiring place to start a discussion about the future of Jewish-themed novels. I haven´t been surprised at such a great extent by a book since discovering Jorge L. Borges, many many springs away.
The book is mindblowing by its complexity of the story and its references: both historical - Jewish and universal - as well as pertaining to the world. And it´s populated by an enormous amount of characters as well, that the author is playing skillfully as a puppeteer with his feet steady in the middle of the world. Among them, a one-arm businessman from Columbia, a (Jewish) pirate, Sicilian soldiers, a physician interested in parallel universes, Adana Moreau who wrote and published a SF book that got lost in New Orleans after her premature death in 1929 and recovered during our common era through an accident of sorts.
The search for Adana´s son turns into a quixotic journey, which connects, as patches of colourful but diverse pieces of fabric, Jewish stories from all over the world, flowing seamlessy through centuries. The paradigm of the parallel universes resonates with the complexity itself of the Jewish lives, caught between present and the heavy - unbearable sometimes - past. Jumping from a parallel quanta to another, the story within the stories can be read as the the paradigm of Jewish narrative as well. Too diverse to be said into one story, very much connected with disparate geographical references from all over the world, never complete without the (un)safe details of the wider social spectrum. It sounds as a post-modern chaos and listening to the story I had to stop and listen again a fragment or another, but all comes together as a story.
The Last Book of Adana Moreau is bold in its embrace of diversity of all kinds, but it also creates a happy literary precedent where creativity is highly at work and there are no limits for its courage to say all and everything.
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