A Verse from Babylon

Jeannelle M. Ferreira

This is a rough book to review. Jeannelle Ferreira has created something of great worth here, but it's hard to figure out how to go about talking about it.

"This is a true story," the beginning of the book tells us. That may not be entirely the case, but it is, I think, an honest story, at least as honest as any of the presently controversial "memoirs" we'll all have forgotten about in five years are. Ferreira based many of these characters on real people, working in many cases with primary source: their letters and diaries, their published works. And, in one case, the weight of family history, as well. From this, she has cobbled together an impressionist tale of a group of Jewish artists during World War II in the Vilna ghetto in Lithuania. While it manifests itself as an ensemble piece, it becomes obvious that its main characters are Raissa Gellerman, her brother Beniek, and Beniek's wife Fayge. A number of others are major characters, including Hirsh, who loves Raissa unrequitedly, and Violeta, Raissa's lover, both also members of the troupe, as well as a select few kapo.

Its greatest weakness, to me, is the impressionism of its style. It wouldn't be such a terrible thing if the narrative didn't also make minor jumps back and forth in time, which can make things confusing. The end result reads, at times, like a bastard offspring of Cormac McCarthy and Philip K. Dick. Which is not necessarily a bad thing; both Dick and McCarthy are excellent writers, with the same basic ideas of just how depraved a society can get, and this is something Ferreira's got her head wrapped around very well. Like McCarthy, she tens to let the vilest of the actions take place just offscreen, with us seeing aftereffects or a flash of skin most of the time rather than getting the full frontal shot-- so in those instances when we do get the full monty, it's all the more shocking. Very effectively done, and a good balance to the confusing bits (which, I should say, are not frequent) in other parts of the book. Like Dick, Ferreira has a finely-honed sense of the potential contained in any dystopian society, and if Lithuania under the Nazis wasn't a dystopian society, I'm not terribly sure what qualifies.

Now having spent an entire paragraph on the idea of weakness, all I can say about the book's strength-- or all I should need to, anyway-- is in the book's writing. These are deeply-felt, excellently-drawn characters that demand your time and attention. The situations they're in are believable-- at least, as believable as anything could be in Nazi-controlled territory in the late thirties and early forties-- and the characters' reactions to their situations are also believable. Ferreira creates the illusion that one doesn't need suspension of disbelief here.

A very good debut novel. Watch this one, she's going places.