This week’s entry may be on the short side. Rosellen and I have been working on a presentation for our Jewish group next Saturday that’s consumed most of my writing time this week. One of the books I comment on today is related to that presentation which I hope to give more space to next week.
Yes, this is one of my occasional book talks, an opportunity for me to recommend some reading that has excited me that I hope will do the same for you. In fact, that’s how I came upon the first of today’s two books myself. My Houston friend Christa Forster posted such a ringing endorsement of Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq on Facebook that I immediately put a hold on it at our local library branch. Obviously, Christa is not alone in her enthusiasm since it took six weeks for my name to reach the top of the holds list. That should not have surprised me because the book was the 2025 International Booker Prize winner.
The author of this book of short stories lives in the South Indian state of Karnataka and writes in Kannada, one of the hundreds of indigenous languages spoken in India. If not for the efforts of Heart Lamp’s translator, Deepa Bashti, who won the English PEN award for her efforts, this unique and moving book would have escaped the attention of us narrowly focused English readers. Mushtaq, an accomplished writer, lawyer and activist, has been writing, in her own words, “about women -how religions, society and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and along the way inflict inhumane cruelty upon them, turning them into subordinates.
This is the first time the International Booker Prize has gone to a story collection rather than a novel, and these stories are unlike any I’ve read before. They’re set in Muslim towns and villages in southern India. They are, at once, contemporary and feel like they are unfolding in some pre-industrial period. Life centers around the mosque and its religious leaders, who are not always portrayed in the most flattering light. The same can be said for most men – husbands, brothers, sons.
Some stories are deeply tragic, like the title story in which a wife and mother has been totally cast aside in favor of a new wife and contemplates suicide. Others are wildly, bitingly humorous. A woman whose home has become the gathering place for the whole family’s children during summer school vacation. The ceaseless noise and activity lead her to search for a plan for relief. She organizes a mass circumcision ceremony which at least brings respite for a time.
In her acceptance speech for the Booker Prize, Mushtaq said her book is “a love letter to the idea that no story is ‘local’” and that a story “born under a banyan tree in my village can cast shadows as far as this stage tonight.” Once again, we relearn the lesson we’ve already learned from Faulkner, Garcia Marquez and many others that a story rendered in rich and honest detail has universal resonance.
At the same time, I have been reading something vastly different in setting and form from Heart Lamp. The book is Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History. The author, Steven Zipperstein, is a man of many parts.He is a professor of Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. That title gives him license to range around in areas as diverse as early 20th century Russia (this book) and the work like his just published book about Phillip Roth. I’ve been reading the pogrom book as part of my research for next week’s presentation that I mentioned at the top and which I hope to discuss in next week’s post.
If you are a Jew with family roots in Russia (Belarus and Ukraine, in particular), the Kishinev Pogrom is part of your ancestral story. In 1903, a mob of workers, seminary students and assorted locals with mixed motives, rampaged through Kishinev in southern Russia, a poor sister of Odessa, a cultural center less than a hundred miles distant.
It was Easter season, a time when one of the most destructive myths that has stoked antisemitism for centuries resurfaces: In order to make their Passover matzos, Jews need to sacrifice a Christian child to collect the blood that the recipe calls for. The body of a dead child had been discovered, and even though there was no evidence that his blood had been drained, the discovery triggered a rampage that lasted two days and resulted in horrendous acts of violence in Kishinev’s Jewish quarters – violent murders, serial rapes and wide- spread destruction and looting.
Zipperstein tells the story of the pogrom, from precursor to aftermath with narrative energy and a commitment to historical accuracy. He debunks two widely believed myths – that the Jews stood by passively while their wives, friends and neighbors were slaughtered and that the pogrom was initiated and controlled by the Russian government itself.
The international outcry against these atrocities was loud and sustained. It played a role in many seemingly unrelated events, like the creation of the Haganah, the pre-state ancestor of the Israeli Defense Forces and the creation of the NAACP in the US (no kidding!). More personally, Kishinev and other lesser-known progroms of the period led to a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Jews like my father’s family to America and other western countries.
Kishinev (now the Moldovan capital of Chisinau) also inspired plays, novels and, especially, poetry, which I hope to tell you about next week. Meanwhile, I recommend Zipperstein’s book, a rare combination of good storytelling and relentless research.
