The Severed Wing [Paperback]

Martin Gidron (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2002

Fiction. Martin J. Gidron's novel THE SEVERED WING imagines a world in which Teddy Roosevelt is elected to a third term and leads America into World War I much sooner. A world in which the terms of the Versailles Treaty propose a gentler reconciliation between Allied and Central powers. A world in which neither World War II nor the Holocaust ever occur. It's into this world that Gidron places Janusz, who's fled Poland to evade a military draft, and his lover Irena, daughter of a famous composer. When Irena travels to Greece for her father's funeral, things start going wrong for Janusz: people and places-all of them having a Jewish connection-begin disappearing without a trace. Then the Jewish daily newspaper where Janusz works switches inexplicably from Yiddish to English. The discovery that Janusz makes by the novel's end is as harrowing in its particularity as it is in its universality.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In the alternate twentieth-century world Gidron conjures, the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I--started in 1915 by third-term president Teddy Roosevelt-- didn't lead to the rise of Hitler, World War II, and the Holocaust. Indeed, jet planes and credit cards were not introduced until the late twentieth century, and the U.S. vice president is Susan Sarandon! European anti-Semitism persists, and military actions flare up and die down, so young Janusz Spiegelman flees the Polish draft to America. There he writes for a Yiddish-language daily, and his new lover, Irena, understudies Julia Roberts in The Sandcastle. When Irena returns to Greece for her father's funeral, Janusz's world starts disintegrating as places and people--all connected to Judaism--disappear in a hallucinatory scenario that recalls Terry Gilliam's grimly funny futuristic film Brazil, about a man falling into the bureaucratic and political cracks. Janusz's fall, however, is into multiple parallel universes as Nazi power grows. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Martin J. Gidron grew up in the Philadelphia area and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1991 with a B.A. in English Language and Literature. He lived in Israel for six years, returning to the United States in 1997. He is married with two children and lives in Maryland, where he works as a journalist. Gidron's poetry has appeared in Voices Israel, Jewish Currents, and Dragonfly: East-West Haiku Quarterly. A short story, The Tallis, has been published in Jewish Currents.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Livingston Press (October 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0942979966
• ISBN-13: 978-0942979961
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,111,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An eerie and harrowing mystery to solve, September 8, 2002

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Severed Wing (Paperback)

Martin J. Girdon's The Severed Wing is a fascinating novel of set in a parallel-universe history. Teddy Roosevelt was elected a third term and America entered World War I sooner, and neither WW II nor the Holocaust ever occurred. In the present day, bizarre events start happening - people and places with a Jewish connection begin to mysteriously disappear, and the protagonist Janusz, keeps receiving mail that attempts to assign him a "credit card number", is confronted with an eerie and harrowing mystery to solve before time runs out. The Severed Wing is highly recommended as a literate, engaging, science fiction page-turner.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding - Uplifting AND Disturbing, February 11, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Severed Wing (Paperback)

An absolutely incredible book, a true page-turner. As one of those rare under-40 secular Jews who speaks Yiddish, I found the description of a modern world where Yiddish is just another daily language to be like a dream-come-true. And Ladino! Despite the problems described/hinted at, I'd transport myself to Mr. Gidron's timeline without any hesitation whatsoever.

Amazing that while there is a tonne of fiction (though still not enough) about what the world be like if Hitler (may his name be erased) won, there is next to nothing on what it would be like if the 6+ million had not been murdered. My mother's cousin who was studying to be a doctor... or the one who was a cook... the students, the philosophers, the Esperantists... what would the world be like if they'd been allowed to live, and their children been born? I'd never really allowed myself to think of it... thanks to Mr. Gidron, I do. His usage of the disappearance of people and institutions was jarring and extremely effective - giving a real feel for what it was like for those living at the time of the Khurb'n to have large chunks of their lives/culture literally ripped and annihilated from their lives.

A wish of mine would be to see Mr. Gidron - or Harry Turtledove, or Robert Silverberg, or any Jewish author explore this genre further. Heck, I'd love for Mr. Gidron to give us more of the world that isn't - without the coalescence into our world... Personally, I could happily read about a world where the Freyheyt is just another paper, where Yiddish is common, where you can go to Europe and still have thriving Jewish centres in every town and city; just enjoy the vitality and 'normality' of such a world. All succeeding generations of Jews have had that world stolen from US, as well.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A thought provoking read., March 18, 2007

By 

Michael Grant "(no, not that Michael Grant, h... (Trinovant, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Severed Wing (Paperback)

Despite what the cover might suggest, this is not a World War II novel. Nor is it a WW2 alternate history. Instead, it is something I had not come across before, a Holocaust alternate history.

The novel, set in 2000, concerns Janusz, a Polish illegal immigrant in the United States, working as a reporter for the Yiddish-language newspaper _Freiheit_. For, in this world in which WW2 and the rise of Nazism never happened, there is still a burgeoning Yiddish-language culture, and millions of Jews alive who died, or never existed, in our world.

Though Janusz is very much secular--reflecting one of various changes in the life of the post-1940s _ostjuden_ in this novel--the book opens with a quotation from the Mishna: "For thus we find in the case of Cain, who killed his brother, that it is written 'The bloods of your brother cry unto me' (Gen 4:10): Not 'the blood of your brother,' but 'the bloods of your brother'--that is, his blood and the blood of his potential descendants." This is a theme that runs through the book: again and again, we come across Jews whose ancestors were killed in our universe, such as, to give but one example, the daughter of Anne Frank and Walter Benjamin.

Not that this is a rosy alternate: with Jews still being drafted into the armies both of the czar and his opponents in Poland, they are both sides' prime choice to send to the front line. Indeed, without the Holocaust to have brought the world to its senses, the casual antisemitism of the early twentieth century has continued, and eastern Europe is still plagued by pogroms, oh, I'm sorry, ethnic riots. In a way, it's quite depressing.

In America, the _goldeneh Medinah_, none of this applies, but Janusz has problems of his own: when his girlfriend's father dies, she returns to her mother in Salonica, and cannot get a visa back to America. Shortly afterwards, people in Janusz's life start disappearing, one by one: for reasons unexplained, reality is shifting around Janusz, bringing him closer and closer to our world.

Though the subject matter of the book is grim, the book is not, for most of its length. As is common in alternate history and historical fiction, the author has fun dropping in references for the reader to pick up--the old jailbird in the Dominion of Palestine whom the alert reader will recognise as Yitzchak Shamir, the naming of the scheme for preventing the collapse of the Russian Empire at the end of the Great War as the Marshals' Plan, and so forth.

Tech level is in general lower in this universe than ours--jets are still experimental in 2000, (home) computers unknown, and a seventies-vintage radio valve-based. Though this is not explained, the implication I believe is that tech development in our world was driven faster by war: WW2, and possibly the Cold War too.

Towards the end, the structure of the plot seems to break down somewhat: Janusz lurches from crisis to crisis, responding ever less rationally and more impulsively, grasping at any straw he can then rejecting them them in turn. But perhaps, on reflection, this is not necessarily a defect: confronted with an enemy so faceless, one could sympathise with such behaviour. As for the ending, (spoiler ROT13-ed) gubhtu aneengvir pbairagvba fhttrfgrq (gb zr ng yrnfg) gung Wnahfm jbhyq riraghnyyl or erhavgrq jbgu Veran, naq gur gvzryvar fgnovyvfr nebhaq gurz, va uvaqfvtug V frr vg jbhyq or n orgenlny bs uvfgbel sbe gung gb unir unccrarq. Ab "pbfl pngnfgebcur" urer.

The author talks in his afterword about his reasons for writing this: how the Jewish perception of history has become distorted, to appear to converge upon the Holocaust and establishment of the State of Israel, but also how the Holocaust has become a cliché, "a euphemism for the nearly infinite evil and loss it represents, and a way for us to avoid confronting it." This novel addresses both of these concerns; a thought-provoking read, I recommend it.