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The Singing Fire

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There is an area of London often ignored in popular history. "This was the high road of the ghetto, the one square mile where Yiddish was spoken, the irritating pimple on the backside of London, the subject of parliamentary debate, the hundred thousand newcomers among the millions, ready to take fog as their mother's milk here in the East End, where all the noisy, dirty, and stinking industries were exiled from the city."

Canadian author Lilian Nattel is trying something different for her sophomore effort. Her first novel, the award-winning The River Midnight, was an exercise in magical realism, a plainly fictional conglomeration of men endowed with the power of transmogrification, angels and demons manipulating mankind to their heart's content, and even the Angel of Death itself, all weaving throughout a late 19th century Polish-Jewish hamlet.

In Nattel's follow-up novel, the fantastic co-mingles with realism in a far more muted fashion. Ghosts of grandmothers and wives flit about in the background, providing minor commentary, but more content to stand mutely by, watching as the tragedy of life unfolds about them, tut-tutting to themselves all the while. Nattel is more focused on the human element this time around, resulting in a story that, if more traditional in form than the predecessor, has greater depth and resonance.

The Singing Fire, a notably fine novel, continues Nattel's exploration of Jewish identity, this time in turn-of-the-century London. Amidst the peddlers and thieves lining the streets and doorways, Nattel drops Nehama, an innocent Polish runaway dreaming of independence. Ignorant and confused, she finds herself literally sold into prostitution, beginning a chain of misfortune and adversity made all the more painful by her stubborn refusal to give up her dreams.

Nattel parallels Nehama's hardships with those of Emilia's, a pregnant Russian runaway who finds shelter with Nehama. Determined to make a finer life for herself, Emilia flees the "half-Yiddish, half-Cockney English of the alley." Abandoning her baby with Nehama, she creates a new image for herself as a gentile in London's West End.

Alongside Nattel's vivid descriptions of the hardscrabble lives of her women, Nattel delves into the spiritual and moral heritage of the Jewish experience in England. Her London is a vast cultural landscape divided between the East End traditionalists, and the assimilated English Jews of the West End. The poor of the East End find themselves derided by the population, while the upper-class Jews are "edgy, sitting as they did on a spiked fence between their Englishness and their Jewishness, wanting to prove one and too often reminded of the other, whether by their own hearts or by the distrust of the English-English."

Nattel, while not a particularly remarkable stylist, is an absolutely natural storyteller. Her London is boldly alive, a vibrant universe of pain and stereotypes that she tweaks slightly with her own sensibilities, bringing fresh insight to an atmosphere that has grown lyrically stale since the days of Charles Dickens.

Yet Nattel's London would be nothing but window-dressing without her characters. Nehama and Emilia provide sterling examples of the survival of insanity. Nehama experiences all the brutality and indifference a Jewish woman can expect of the times, while Emilia undergoes the extreme crisis of conscience in her determined efforts to deny her heritage. Many books have been penned on the Hebrew life, but rarely has such commentary received the compassion Nattel brings to her writing.

The Singing Fire has no great meaning behind its story. There are "no great needs, only necessary ones." Lilian Nattel wants to bring voice to those who have not been allowed to speak, and she succeeds wonderfully

Truly unforgettable.This is a wonderful, sensitive, real portrayal of women. I am recommending it to my book group and friends. I would have given it 5 stars but I found the first 25 pages difficult to get through. Once past the beginning, I loved it.