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May. 2nd, 2019 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI went into Elana Dykewoman's Beyond the Pale expecting, say, 60% lesbian romance, 40% Jewish Immigrant Story; what I got was more like 100% Jewish Immigrant Story, that happens to be about a lot of lesbians. Or maybe 120% Jewish Immigrant Story? Beyond the Pale is a fair amount of book.
Beyond the Pale starts with the story of Gutke, a lesbian midwife in the turn-of-the-century Pale of Settlement, who occasionally has visions of the future and sees ghosts, but quickly shifts focus to Chava, one of the girls Gutke delivers and later intermittently mentors on the occasions that their paths cross through the years. Chava has no supernatural abilities, but that's probably just as well, as she's really too busy getting involved in labor organization to have time to deal with visions. Up the union!
Dykewoman clearly poured a ton of research into Beyond the Pale and it shows. On the one hand, occasionally one starts to feel like Dykewoman had a list of Jewish Immigrant Experiences that needed checking off (Zionist brother, check; socialist brother, check; pogrom, check; Ellis Island, check; assimilationist brother, check; garment industry, check; tenement strikes, check; Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, check) but on the other hand the wealth of specific detail in and around the tentpoles makes it an enormously lived-in book, if occasionally somewhat slow. And there's for sure something about the fact that it is such a very classic iteration of the Classic Jewish Immigrant Story, with queer women so effortlessly centered in it; it makes a statement without having to make a statement. There were times I found the book slow, and other times a casual statement would hit my id with the force of a thousand suns, as with the lesbian dinner party scene where Chava and her girlfriend meet Gutke's partner, cross-dressing banker Dovida:
"Are there many women who go about disguised as you do?"
"It depends on what you mean by many [...] more than a minyan, not enough for a union."
This is ... really quite overwhelmingly on my brand, and also how I want to count everything from now on!
Beyond the Pale starts with the story of Gutke, a lesbian midwife in the turn-of-the-century Pale of Settlement, who occasionally has visions of the future and sees ghosts, but quickly shifts focus to Chava, one of the girls Gutke delivers and later intermittently mentors on the occasions that their paths cross through the years. Chava has no supernatural abilities, but that's probably just as well, as she's really too busy getting involved in labor organization to have time to deal with visions. Up the union!
Dykewoman clearly poured a ton of research into Beyond the Pale and it shows. On the one hand, occasionally one starts to feel like Dykewoman had a list of Jewish Immigrant Experiences that needed checking off (Zionist brother, check; socialist brother, check; pogrom, check; Ellis Island, check; assimilationist brother, check; garment industry, check; tenement strikes, check; Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, check) but on the other hand the wealth of specific detail in and around the tentpoles makes it an enormously lived-in book, if occasionally somewhat slow. And there's for sure something about the fact that it is such a very classic iteration of the Classic Jewish Immigrant Story, with queer women so effortlessly centered in it; it makes a statement without having to make a statement. There were times I found the book slow, and other times a casual statement would hit my id with the force of a thousand suns, as with the lesbian dinner party scene where Chava and her girlfriend meet Gutke's partner, cross-dressing banker Dovida:
"Are there many women who go about disguised as you do?"
"It depends on what you mean by many [...] more than a minyan, not enough for a union."
This is ... really quite overwhelmingly on my brand, and also how I want to count everything from now on!
