The River Midnight, A Novel [Hardcover]

Lilian Nattel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 11, 1999

This stunning debut from a major new talent "brings to mind such diverse writers as Isabel Allende, E. L. Doctorow, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, though Ms. Nattel's sensibility is uniquely hers" (Julie Salamon). Combining prodigious research and a fevered imagination, The River Midnight brilliantly brings to life all the things that books about the shtetl have traditionally left out -- women's lives and women's prayers, sex, crime, the intimate details of everyday life.

Myth meets history in Blaszka, a fictional village northwest of Warsaw, where angels and demons walk in the fin de siècle shadows, enticing the people of Blaszka to face their deepest wishes and fears. Listen. You can hear the excitement in the village square, the flimsy stalls piled high with everything, and in the center Misha the midwife laughing. She is a big, free, independent spirit in a world determined by strict rules -- men separated from women, meat from dairy, shabbes from everyday. When Misha was a girl she danced in the woods with her friends, the four vilda hayas, the "wild creatures" as they were known. But now the women have grown apart, divided by geography, by the pain of one's infertility next to the others' fecundity, and by love's demands.

The River Midnight is the incredibly engrossing and moving story of what happens when the town midwife becomes pregnant. Misha, the keeper of village secrets, will reveal to no one the biggest secret of all: the identity of the father to her unborn child. Do the men and women of Blaszka abandon Misha, who is the wayward heart of the village? Or do they come together and keep God waiting for their prayers?

This novel explores the tension between men and women, and celebrates the wordless and kinetic bond of friendship.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Like the mythical Polish shtetl of Blaszka in which it is set, The River Midnight is boisterous, tangled with secrets, and startlingly generous. Told more as nine interwoven stories, Lilian Nattel's debut novel portrays Jewish village life in the 19th century as both dense and wondrous, something akin to Gabriel García Márquez's Macondo--with similar touches of magic realism. The novel uses a roughly nine-month period in 1894 as its framework, each chapter recounting many of the same events through the eyes of successive characters. Along the way we encounter the pettiness, charity, gossip, and customs that sustain the village, making its cramped life both full and frustrating. At the center of this whirl is Misha, the midwife, whose own pregnancy is one of the book's abiding mysteries, and who, despite her inscrutability, elicits a resolute affection from her fellow villagers: the men who have loved or admired her, and the women she has befriended, provoked, and, ultimately, redeemed. "I have to hold the secrets of the whole village," Misha explains, and as we learn of her girlhood friendships and adult loves, the twined network of those secrets becomes increasingly apparent.

The novel's ambitious fragmentation, while it may occasionally lead us down the same stretch of road, is undeniably effective--revealing the bottomless texture of mingled lives. And while the story's magic realism is a bit intermittent and tangential, Nattel more than compensates with lush, scrupulous detail and an unerring eye for the tension between self-interest and benevolence. In The River Midnight, she has created a world where flesh and prayer, accident and magic, coincide. --Ben Guterson

From Publishers Weekly

Canadian author Nattel's debut novel poignantly and humorously evokes shtetl life by interweaving stories of four Jewish women in Blaszka, a turn-of-the-century Polish village. As vilda hayas (wild children), they romp in the woods. As adults, they bind their community together through their shared joys, sorrows, schemes and scandals. Married to the butcher and running his shop with wily efficiency, childless Hanna-Leah likes to bathe and dream in the Polnocna (Midnight) River. Restless Faygela has several children, the eldest in jail for helping her American cousin spread revolutionary ideas. After Zisa-Sara dies in America, her orphaned children are returned to her native village to be raised by friends. Looming over all is earth-goddess Misha, a strong, independent midwife who divorces her husband and refuses to remarry or reveal the father of her child. Blaszka plays host to Russians, Poles, Jews, non-Jews, players, peddlers, drifters and demons. As villagers travel, the reader also glimpses the streets of Plotsk, Paris, Warsaw and immigrant New York. Retelling each scene from different perspectives in fluid prose dotted with aphorisms and Yiddishisms, Nattel celebrates a culture that values scholarship, charity and individual freedom, its high-mindedness balanced by a coarse appreciation of human weakness. Details of food preparation, sexual attitudes, religious ritual and family routine produce a richly textured portrait of a small town. While her modest magic realism (evidently owing a debt to Singer and Aleichem) never soars, it beautifully captures a lost way of life and its enduring sense of community. Agent, Helen Heller. BOMC and QPB alternates; rights sold in Italy, Germany, Canada, U.K. and the Netherlands.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1st edition (January 11, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684853035
• ISBN-13: 978-0684853031
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #655,294 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Welcome! I'm Lilian Nattel, novelist and mom. I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in a 100 year old house that is high and narrow, in a kid-friendly, granola-eating neighbourhood. I write, dabble in photography, sew a bit, knit a bit, skate and swim. I love books and I love food but my husband is the cook in the family. My 1st two novels were historical fiction, & my latest novel, Web of Angels, is set right here in my neighbourhood in the 2000's. I always have more ideas than lives, but my two amazing kids keep me grounded. Books are a partnership between author and readers. I love the way the internet brings us together so the conversation can continue!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A need to share this book., January 25, 2000

By 

Georgene A. Bramlage "Cercis" (Leverett, MA / Roanoke, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The River Midnight, A Novel (Hardcover)

An excellent first novel of a time and place that I've heard about too little. Although I am not Jewish, this book portrays a time and place from which my grandparents escaped. It was like hearing my grandfather speak of the countryside, political situation, and schooling. Now, I understand why he could read and write four languages (and church Latin!). A criticsim I've read is that some of the characters are not fully developed. However, isn't this the way with "real" life? A part of us always remains hidden from those around us...was Hannah-Leah's failure to have children due to something with her or with her husband? We'll never know and back then even a midwife couldn't know for sure. As for the angel characters, aside from a literary device, who's to say they didn't exist then and don't exist now? I found the environmental descriptions both imagined and real an integral and rewarding part of the story - I wouldn't want to enter that mikvah. The extensive bibliography also shows good research and some guidlines for more in-depth reading. For this sharing, a big thank-you to the author.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My FAVORITE book!, December 8, 1999

By 

Cathy G. Plotkin (Washington, DC area) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The River Midnight, A Novel (Hardcover)

I borrowed this book from my mother and read it in a week's time. For anyone whose ancestors came from Poland, it gives a personal glimpse into what shetyl life might have been like. These four women also have contemporary counterparts in today's world- an intellectual, a dreamer, a family person, and a professional (midwife). This book so touched my heart that I felt a strong desire to share with all my friends. To this end, I have started a book club with 16 people, and this book is our first selection. As my friends are reading it, they are pouring in songs of praise. The BEST read in a long, long time. Enjoy! It is a wonderful historically accurate novel.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars You will love this book from the first story to the last., September 3, 2000

By 

R. Peterson "I'm worldwide..." (St. Thomas (USVI)) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The River Midnight (Paperback)

Nattel has taken the life in a tiny Polish shtetl before the Holocaust (and one that we come to understand disappeared during that horrendous period) and presents it to the reader through the thoughts and feelings of the villagers, both men and women. In the first half of the book we are introduced to the original four wild girls, Misha, the midwife; Faygela, the mother of many and wife of the village baker; Hannah-Leah, the butcher's wife; and the children of Zisa-Sara who had left the shtetl with her husband, only to die in a sweatshop fire in New York City and leave her orphaned children to return to her native home. The tales told through these women and men of this imaginary town in Poland are sweet, magical, aggravating, heart-wrenching, startling, and just about every other adjective you can imagine. Nattel is a marvelous story-teller and the reader is caught up from the first page in the lives and loves of these simple and wonderful people. Of particular joy to me was the sprinkling of Yiddish that Nattel uses throughout the book - it not only gives the right flavor to the tales, but since many of the words are reminiscent of my childhood in a Jewish-oriented community, they are like old familiar friends. They add a somewhat funny, appropriate, accurate and tasty spice to the stories of the interactions, friendships, secrets and ties that these people have with one and other. This is a wonderful book.