cover image The Promised Land

The Promised Land

Ruhama Veltfort. Milkweed Editions, $23.95 (310pp) ISBN 978-1-57131-022-4

Veltfort's unusual and affecting first novel chronicles a 19th-century Moses who leads his small tribe of orthodox Jews from the privations and dangers of a Polish shtetl through the rigors of the ocean crossing and a harrowing wagon-train trip across the American continent to California. Here, however, daily hardships are counterpointed by the characters' inner journeys as they try to retain and interpret the faith of their fathers while facing the hostility and antireligious temptations of the modern world. Veltfort has a fine grasp of orthodox Jewish life, scrupulously re-creating the daily routines of the primitive shtetl where narrator Chana is betrothed to peddler Yitzhak Salomon after the itinerant Hasid miraculously cures a sick child. Yitzhak has studied under a famous Hasidic teacher in Cracow, who helps him interpret his recurring dream of Jews fleeing from their flaming homes as a mystical injunction to lead them to the new promised land, America. Even as Yitzhak, Chana and their companions nearly starve, fight off marauders and endure injuries and epidemics, they ponder questions of morality, anguish about issues of ritual observance under alien conditions, question biblical injunctions and suffer the loss of faith as they seek to understand the tragedies that afflict them. The narrative's mixture of earthy detail and magical realism is sometimes a rough one, and poet Veltfort's (Whispers of a Dreamer) prose is awkwardly hyperbolic. Nevertheless, she makes entertaining work of the inherently suspenseful journey along the Oregon Trail, and she brings insight into the emotional and spiritual journey from Old World to New. Author tour. (Nov.)