A Song at the Edge of the World

In this freewheeling romp by the author of the post-Holocaust novel Not Me (“Nothing short of brilliant” —Baltimore Sun), the story of the great Andalusian Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi frames a batch of nested tales of Jews getting into trouble across the centuries and across continents, still looking for home.

Beginning in the 1830s, with an itinerant Viennese book dealer who doesn’t know the value of the moldy old Hebrew typescript he has to sell and a Paduan scholar who surely does, the novel plays fictional cat and mouse with the beloved historical figure of Halevi, who was shaped by the Andalusian culture of 12th-century Muslim Spain and famously wrote “My heart is in the East/ And I am at the edge of the West.” The fictional Jacob, a salt merchant’s son in Zaragoza, leaves home in hopes of following in the footsteps of the great poet, whose legendary life-ending journey to Jerusalem remains shrouded in mystery. Jacob’s quest interleaves chapters in which each generation, whatever corner of the diaspora they are stuck in, must ask: where do we Jews belong, if not Jerusalem?  

Whether it is the scion of a wealthy family in 14th-century Vaucluse who looks too closely at a gentile maiden in the act of washing her feet, or the beautiful Elizabeta DaSilva, an assimilated high-society portraitist who develops an inconvenient passion for an Orthodox dressmaker or the American Sam Cole (born Kolowitz), who runs afoul of the Newark mob when he tries his hand in the moving-picture business, everyone on this merry-go-round of lives carries a piece of Halevi’s poetry on their bumpy path to enlightenment. Halevi’s song at the edge of the world—with its unanswered question of whether we should return to the East, or make the best of our scattered state, a question that remains vexing to this day—whispers in the background of their struggles, and only at the end will we learn why the tale is being told, and by whom.

A poem by Halevi is woven through each chapter in this great human comedy connecting Jews across time—one which, like all comedies, contains a deep note of the tragic.