Strange Ways

Strange Ways (Of fremde Vegn) by Rokhl Faygenberg (fiction, 192 pages, LibraryThing Early Reviewers program)

Strange ways, indeed. I don’t know if it was the writing or the translation, but I found this book very hard to follow. While I am not unfamiliar with narratives moving back and forth in time, Rokhl Faygenberg’s Strange Ways (written in Yiddish in 1925 and recently translated by Robert and Golda Werman) read more as if someone had taken each chapter, cut it into individual paragraphs, thrown them in a pile, and pasted them back together randomly.

Strange Ways takes place in a Polish shetl at the turn of the twentieth century, and follows several Jewish characters, but it is primarily the story of Sheyndel, a young woman who becomes a midwife and entertains various intellectuals in her salon apartment, and Borukh, her married businessman lover. Strange Ways also tantalizes the reader with the possibility of being about the shetl itself, and the rising tensions between the Jews who live in it and the Christians who want to move them out of it, but that story is strangely dropped without ever coming to an end.

I wanted to like Strange Ways, but I just couldn’t. Aside from the confusing temporal changes and the abandoned conflict between the Jews and the Christians, my modern sensibilities were too offended. Without giving too much away (but don’t read on if you really don’t want any spoilers) the burden of the forbidden love affair is all on the woman, while the man not only gets away with everything but is given the possibility of a second chance.

Faygenberg has some interesting points on morality and religion, and some of her prose is lovely. Strange Ways gives the reader a good sense of place and atmosphere. But most of her characters are viewed at a remove, and (possibly due to the translation) do not stay consistent from moment to moment. In the end, the reader is left without an emotional connection to any of the characters, and a feeling of disappointment for the story she didn’t get.