In this freewheeling romp by the author of the post-Holocaust novel Not Me (“Nothing short of brilliant” —Baltimore Sun), the final pilgrimage of the great Andalusian Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi frames a tale of Jews getting into trouble across centuries and continents, still looking for home.
Beginning in the 1830s, when an itinerant Viennese book dealer doesn’t know the value of the moldy old Hebrew typescript he has to sell, this novel plays fictional cat and mouse with the historical figure of Halevi, who was shaped by the rich 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.” Jacob, a salt merchant’s son in Zaragoza, leaves home to follow in the footsteps of the great poet, whose life-ending journey to Jerusalem remains shrouded in mystery. Jacob’s quest interleaves chapters in which each generation—from a well-heeled Jewish son of 14th-century Vaucluse to a 20th-century fish monger in Newark—must ask: where do we Jews truly belong?
Everyone on the merry-go-round of diasporic lives carries a piece of Halevi’s poetry on their bumpy path to enlightenment, and only at the end of this era-spanning human comedy will we learn why their tale is being told, and by whom.
