Eleven-year-old Lev Meyer's world is full of wonder as he strives to make sense of small, but intriguing changes. Why is Alex Caufin in his class, filling his notebook with zeros and ones, when it is supposed to be a writing journal? Is it a secret code? Why is Mr. Katz, a Hasidic Jew, who lived down the block from Lev's home, painting tree leaves green?
Lev's mother died when he was five so he hardly remembers her and no one in the house wants to talk about her. Still, memories surface with certain smells and sights. Why does his dad sometimes smell like perfume? Is he secretly sniffing his mother's perfume because he misses her, too? Now Sammy, as he calls his thirteen- year-old sister Samara, is acting funny and is lighting a candle in her bedroom on Friday nights. Mr. Glassman, their next door neighbour and his teacher at the Hebrew School Lev attends, is impressed with how well Sammy is doing preparing for her bat mitzvah. But when he goes to tell her as they do the dishes after dinner, she gives him a warning look. Now, she doesn't want to talk about Jenny, her best friend. Another secret to add to the list. What is going on?
THE MYSTICS OF MILE END is an impressive and brilliantly written debut novel by Sigal Samuel, an award-winning writer, playwright, journalist and editor for The Jewish Daily Forward. Samuel's many talents as a writer definitely shine as she immediately pulls you into the story and elegantly reveals the ongoing events happening to this small family bereft by the loss of their mother and the impact it has on their faith.
Much of the story revolves around David Meyer, a McGill University professor of Mysticism and the impact he has on others. After his wife died, he turned away from his faith and left his children alone and adrift to find their own way to deal with their sadness. Now, their home is filled with secrets they keep from each other and their friends. While currently living in Brooklyn, Samuel is a Montreal native who has very authentically and humourously integrated her fictional characters into this mixed neighbourhood of Hasidic Jews and the trendy. By coincidence or fate, it just happened that I lived on one of the very streets she describes as an eleven-year- old girl and later went to McGill, so I can fully attest to that!
THE MYSTICS OF MILE END is powerfully told from the perspectives of three of the family members, and the fourth from key characters in this unique part of Montreal. From their voices, thoughts and reactions, Samuel juxtaposes so many ideas and situations about love, grief, resiliency, astronomy, religion, faith and mysticism that are compelling and thought-provoking but not cluttered or forced. Samuel is truly a master storyteller!
Artfully woven into these contemporary concerns in THE MYSTICS OF MILE END are old Jewish texts, especially concerning the Tree of Life and its many fruits that can prove just as dangerous to later followers as to those who took the first taste. These teachings from a branch of the Kabbalah are intricately linked in Samuel's multilayered plot and adds much to savour and reflect on.
THE MYSTICS OF MILE END is such an engaging and memorable book that readers will have trouble putting it down, especially as it moves to its strange and exciting conclusion. It definitely would be a great discussion book for any book club, and I am definitely adding it to mine! I am so looking forward to more from this terrific author!
Sigal Samuel’s debut novel, in the vein of Nicole Krauss’s bestselling The History of Love, is an imaginative story that delves into the heart of Jewish mysticism, faith, and family. “This is not an ordinary tree I am making. “This,” he said, “this is the Tree of Knowledge.” In the half-Hasidic, half-hipster Montreal neighborhood of Mile End, eleven-year-old Lev Meyer is discovering that there may be a place for Judaism in his life. As he learns about science in his day school, Lev begins his own extracurricular study of the Bible’s Tree of Knowledge with neighbor Mr. Katz, who is building his own Tree out of trash. Meanwhile his sister Samara is secretly studying for her Bat Mitzvah with next-door neighbor and Holocaust survivor, Mr. Glassman. All the while his father, David, a professor of Jewish mysticism, is a non-believer. When, years later, David has a heart attack, he begins to believe God is speaking to him. While having an affair with one of his students, he delves into the complexities of Kabbalah. Months later Samara, too, grows obsessed with the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life— hiding her interest from those who love her most–and is overcome with reaching the Tree’s highest heights. The neighbors of Mile End have been there all along, but only one of them can catch her when she falls.
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