Isaac Babel (1894-1940) didn’t write an awful lot—his untimely execution didn’t help—but in much of what he did write, he chronicled, with consummate craft, energy, empathy and humour, the experiences of Jewish men coming of age in the Pale of Settlement, on Tsarist Russia’s western edge, from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Manya Wilkinson’s Lublin, her second novel after a gap of more than thirty years, sits neatly in the world of Babel’s Odessa Stories (1931). Like Babel, Wilkinson knows when to be funny (a lot of the time, fortunately), when to be poignant, and, most important of all, how to keep readers turning pages even though the chance of a happy ending is diminishing all the time.  

Set in 1907, in Russian-controlled Poland, Lublin is the tale of Enya, Kiva, and Ziv, three fourteen-year-old boys who set out from their isolated Jewish community of Mezrítsh, which has a reputation for producing excellent brushes made from pig bristles, precisely the merchandise with which they hope to make their fortune. Even this aspect of the venture is problematic, as Wilkinson’s narrator notes: “This is an uncomfortable truth and no one really understands why Jews, forbidden to eat pigs, or raise pigs, can make brushes from their bristles.” The anti-clerical, revolutionary Ziv offers an explanation: “Your rabbis only care about lining their own pockets. They’re getting a percentage.”  

All three are unprepared for the journey, but in different ways. Enya, whose brainchild this expedition is, is the only one truly interested in making money. He’s defying the wishes of his mother, who would rather he simply get married, so as to protect him against forced conscription into the Tsar’s army, and become a shoemaker like his dead father. Enya dreams instead of emulating his hero, Kiva’s uncle, the local brush manufacturing kingpin who has provided them with their wares. Kiva, for his part, dreams of studying Torah and worshipping Adoshem for the rest of his life. His mother has bullied him into taking this trip. Ziv, the poorest of the three, dreams of revolution, boxing, and girls, not always in that order, and is in search of a good time. His mother is too busy scratching out a living to care about what he’s doing. The three protagonists respectively embody a force that will shape the twentieth century: capitalism, religion, and revolution. Other archetypes are thrown in as well, perhaps too forcibly. While Enya may be believable as a compulsive joke-teller, the garrulous, no-nonsense Ziv seems an unlikely reader of Dostoevsky. 

As the tale gets underway, Wilkinson’s prose works its melancholy, elliptical magic. The boys are following a map drawn for Enya by an older merchant, most likely with his tongue placed firmly in cheek. The map includes no proper names but only fantastical-sounding landmarks such as Prune Town and Village of Girls. The journey contains real dangers—speeding carriages, antisemitic Russian and Polish peasants, aggressive dogs, army recruiters who are also kidnappers, bad weather, disease and bloodthirsty Cossacks—and the boys are also assailed by more far-fetched threats, such as the demons that Kiva sees lurking everywhere, held at bay only by compulsive blessings. 

Departing from Babelian immediacy, Wilkinson’s prose moves into more whimsical, postmodern territory as she sprinkles her narration with omniscient titbits on topics like the invention of the ballpoint pen, the founding of the Boy Scout movement, and the claiming of Belgian Congo by King Leopold II. Countless deaths are foretold, including those of most of the characters in the book. Yiddish words and expressions, Enya’s hit-and-miss jokes, Jewish folk tales and parables—are all deployed with evident relish. But everything is overshadowed by the inconceivable tragedies that, within decades, will befall these boys and their communities, a horror to which the narrator alludes only briefly, because that’s all it takes:

First they stare wide-eyed. Then, still holding hands, they stand up and cry, ‘Hurrah!’ They can’t help themselves. They’re just boys after all. And, well, it’s affecting. They have seldom seen soldiers in Mezrítsh, although one day the town will be occupied by them, commandeered by a general, if you can believe that. And no one can. But never mind. It’s all in the future, a million versts away.

If this all seems a lot, that’s because it is. An episodic plot involving such weighty themes risks unravelling as quickly as the wannabe merchants’ initial optimism. But as Wilkinson hops around in time and space, moving among the perspectives and memories of her three heroes as well as their nearest and dearest, she keeps proceedings admirably taut while conjuring remarkably full and vivid lives.

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Manya Wilkinson is a Jewish New Yorker who has lived in the North of England for more than twenty years. Formerly a senior MA lecturer on prose and scriptwriting at Newcastle University, she is currently teaching prose workshops for Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts and Mslexia. Her first novel, Ocean Avenue (1991) was published by Serpent’s Tail, and her short stories by Comma Press. Her radio dramas have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Afternoon Play, Saturday Drama, Writing the Century, and Woman’s Hour.

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Kit Maude is a translator based in Buenos Aires.