Customer Reviews

The Severed Wing

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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.

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.

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.

Janusz Spiegelman has become unstuck in reality. He is the protagonist of Martin Gidron's somewhat Vonnegutian alternate history of a world in which the Holocaust never occurred -- where a shorter First World War and stronger international socialist movement allowed the "long nineteenth century" to continue stumbling along into the twenty-first. So Janusz, a Polish draft dodger and undocumented immigrant, lives in the crowded tenements of Manhattan's Lower East Side, writing for a Yiddish-language daily newspaper. But Janusz has nightmares of mass executions, cattle cars and poison gas, and after every nightmare some piece of his world simply disappears, his reality gradually converging with our own.

This inventive concept allows Gidron to put human faces on the enormity of the Holocaust, as well as challenge the idea that it was somehow inevitable (an argument he addresses in a special Author's Note). He is also able to do some inventive worldbuilding, imagining what might have been if the Jewish communities of Europe, and their descendants, had been allowed to survive to the present. Accompanied, of course, by the casual anti-Semitism that the Holocaust made unthinkable, along with the decrepit empires of old Europe, their internecine conflicts, pogroms, and colonial ambitions.

While the setting is promising and the concept captivating, I came away from "The Severed Wing" feeling that not enough had been done with them. The book has relatively little in the way of plot, and mainly features Janusz wandering aimlessly (and recalling his earlier, equally aimless years in Poland and among the Zionist underground in British Palestine) to give Gidron opportunities to infodump his counterfactual speculations. While those speculations struck me as plausible enough, I didn't see enough of a narrative framework for them to hang on. Gidron just seems to be building his world up enough for it all to fall apart in the increasingly surreal final chapters.

Gidron also makes the alternate history beginner's mistake of having far too many cameos from real-life figures (from Bill Gates to Anne Frank, Paul Simon to Yitzhak Shamir) and clever puns (like the "Marshals' Plan" that kept Czarist Russia from falling to Communism). Having a few jokes of that sort is one of the guilty pleasures of alternate history writing, welcome in moderation. Gidron gives in to temptation and overdoes it, to the detriment of his setting and his story.

I can see why "The Severed Wing" won a Sidewise Award for Best Long-Form Alternate History, but I can't give it full marks. However, I would be happy to see Gidron return to the genre, in this setting or a different one, and continue to hone his skills.

This sophisticated novel is an engaging, well written, page-turner. It was enjoyable to read and left the reader with much to think about.

Imagine the "Wheels of If" turning for a Polish-Jewish journalist in a New York where Teddy Roosevelt ended WW1 in 1916, as he grinds ever closer to our history ... and as our history's Holocaust slowly eradicates everyone he knows in his own timeline. The psychological horror element remains almost too subdued, and the (deliberately) irritating protagonist impedes both the history and the horror, but the novel is that rara avis: a good alternate cultural history, of a world with a Romanov Empire, American colonies in Africa, and 6 million surviving Jews.

For some time, I have been a fan of alternative history. This is the first book that I've read that has as its central premise, "What would the world be like if the Holocaust hadn't happened?" It's not a perfect book -- some of the conclusions are a little simplistic. However, as the plot progresses, it gives a sense of what else was truly lost in the Holocaust - not just the 6 million -- but all of the lives, culture, creativity that could have existed. The generations of people that were truly lost.