Beyond the Pale [Paperback]

Elana Dykewomon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 25, 2003

Beyond the Pale — winner of the Lambda Literary Award — tells the stories of two Jewish women living through times of darkness and inhumanity in the early 20th century, capturing their undaunted love and courage in luminous and moving prose. The richly textured novel details Gutke Gurvich’s odyssey from her apprenticeship as a midwife in a Russian shtetl to her work in the suffrage movement in New York. Interwoven with her tale is that Chava Meyer, who was attended by Gurvich at her birth and grew up to survive the pogrom that took the lives of her parents. Throughout the book, historical background plays a large part: Jewish faith and traditions, the practice of midwifery, the horrific conditions in prerevolutionary Russia and New York sweatshops, and the determined work of labor unionists and suffragists.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Elana Dykewomon's Lambda Award-winning novel Beyond the Pale announces itself to the world with an infant's scream--"a new voice, a tiny shofar announcing its own first year." The midwife attending this birth is Gutke Gurvich, a half-Jew with different colored eyes and a gift for seeing into the spirit world. Beyond the Pale is Gutke's story, detailing her odyssey from a Russian shtetl to a comfortable Manhattan brownstone. But, as Dykewomon puts it, "Whenever you tell the story of one woman, inside is another," and this rich, multilayered novel is also the story of Chava Meyer, the baby girl Gutke delivered that day, as well as the story of the important women in both of their lives: mothers, sisters, neighbors, lovers, friends. After seeing her mother raped and killed during a particularly vicious progrom in her native village of Kishinev, Chava immigrates to America. There, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, both she and Gutke find themselves involved in the nascent labor union and suffrage movements. Dykewomon has clearly done her research here, and Beyond the Pale presents a beautifully detailed account of life among turn-of-the-century immigrant Jews, from classes at the Henry Street Settlement House to the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Through the lens of several lesbians' lives, Dykewomon draws a portrait of an entire Diasporan community living through the terror and uncertainties of both Russian progroms and life in the New World. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

The pale was a marker outside the Russian towns where Jews were forced to live, but neither separation nor integration protected them from pogroms, which continued into the 20th century. Into this world, midwife Gutke delivers baby Chava in 1889. They meet again after emigrating to New York City, when Chava is a young adult. Dykewomon, author of the classic Riverfinger Women (1974), has written a page-turner that brings to life turn-of-the-century New York's Lower East Side, with its teeming crowds, its sweatshops, the Henry Street Settlement House, and events like the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire. Chava becomes active in the Women's League and is confronted with its racism and anti-Semitism. Gutke, married to a woman who passes as a man, shows Chava (and today's readers as well) one way that women made their lives with other women in the pre-Stonewall era. Infighting and lack of vision among progressive groups, immigrants torn between assimilation and preserving the traditions that define them?these issues are as pressing today as they were a century ago, and they are well portrayed in this historical fiction. Recommended for all collections.?Ina Rimpau, Newark P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 406 pages
• Publisher: Raincoast Books; 2nd edition (September 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 155192613X
• ISBN-13: 978-1551926131
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,234,805 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Outstanding, Memorable Book - A Joy to Read, July 14, 2000

By 

Lawrence Falk (Prospect, KY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beyond the Pale by Elena Dykewomon (Paperback)

One of the most wonderful, beautiful books I have read in the last 20 years. The author has woven a lovely, touching -- and yet, horrifying -- chronicle of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement in Russia and the tenements of New York in the late 1890's and early 1900's. Some of the language simply takes your breath away. Ms. Dykewomon's command on the language is so outstanding I found myself stopping at sentences and marveling at what she had written. Obviously exquisitely researched, Beyond the Pale makes daily life in primarily rural Russia come alive: with all its beauty and all its horror. I have read no finer, more human-oriented account of a pogrom -- and this is an area of historical interest to me. Ms. Dykewomon's characters do not find the "Golden Streets" of the new world when they migrate to New York. Instead, they discover numbing poverty, bedbugs and rats they were hardly used to in the "old country" and the dehumanization of their lives by the factories and take-home piecework which were necessary for mere survival. The author shows these poor souls as the human beings they are and does a truly outstanding job of detailing how the love, kindness, wants and needs of such people can survive amid terrible conditions. Beyond the Pale is a song; it is a lament. While the major characters and author are lesbians, it would be inappropriate to characterize Beyond the Pale as lesbian literature. For those who would be offended and refuse to read this book because of that, it is your great loss. Read this book and cry when you finish. Both for what happens and because there are no more pages to read. I hope the author, who has published other works, will return to the general theme (or a sequel) in the future. She writes historical fiction at its best.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A magnificent work of literature, July 27, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Iowa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beyond the Pale by Elena Dykewomon (Paperback)

This is perhaps the best novel I've read in years -- and I'm a college literature professor, so I read a lot. I'll admit that I'm a Jewish lesbian, so the book has tremendous personal resonance for me. But this is a novel that should greatly affect anyone who cares at all about women's history, the Jewish experience in America, the history of the labor movement -- or, for that matter, fine contemporary writing.

I disagree with the earlier reviewers who characterize the book as either flat or overwritten; I can only imagine that as the reaction if you were looking for a hot but not-too-taxing lesbian romance. This is a different kind of book. There is love between women in this book--quirky, believable, and heartbreaking--but it is not a book that makes the drama of what happens in a couple the entire world. This is love immersed *in* the world. I found the book richly and elegantly written, with excellent depth and insight into the main characters. Elana Dyke! womon is also a fine poet as well as a novelist, and this comes through not only in the verse fragments within the book but also the way it circles around a number of recurrent, evocative images. Anyway, I cannot recommend enough that you take the time to immerse yourself in this finely-crafted, large-spirited, woman-centered novel.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An extremely moving read, January 1, 2006

By 

Erika R. (Hamilton, Ontario) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beyond the Pale (Paperback)

This was a book that I could not put down. The story follows two immigrant women from Russia to America, where they quickly learn that they have left neither poverty nor struggle behind. The characters face so much hardship and tragedy in this story, and yet the darkness is far from oppressing, as one might find with other authors who have attempted a story such as this.
Yes, there is profound sadness in this book (the account of the Triangle fire is almost to hard to read), but there is also joy, understanding and an amazing sense of connection with the characters that will stay with the reader long after the book is finished.