By Tamar Yellin
St Martin’s Press £8.99
Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes is an unsettling book. A meditation on rootlessness, without saying anything particularly profound on the subject, it nonetheless conveys such a pure sense of loneliness, of yearning for home and for belonging, that it left me with a profound sense of melancholy at the end.
While not quite Waiting for Godot — in which the main characters’ boredom with life is transferred to the audience — the emotional impact here, too, seems to be a significant part of the message.
The book consists of 10 short stories, each named after and loosely linked to one of the 10 Jewish tribes driven into exile by the Assyrians in 722 BCE.
They seem to be narrated by the same character, who lacks basic markers of identity, including name and gender. As she (I read her as a female) travels across an unnamed continent, she meets a series of displaced souls, all of whom crave a sense of completeness. But, like the narrator, who seems at her happiest when moving on, they can only imagine finding it elsewhere.
Yellin constructs her moving stories with great style
The narrator’s wanderlust is inspired by her uncle Esdras — the first “lost soul”. He has stopped off at her parents’ house after a period of travelling. To the narrator — still a child — he is a mysterious, romantic figure. Readers, however, soon understand that Esdras is there only to borrow money.
The morning he finally leaves, following a heated row with the narrator’s parents, the narrator hands over to Esdras her mother’s diamond ring in exchange for a worthless talisman — a lemur’s foot that he had told her was “necessary to the traveller”.
“Poor kid”, he says as they complete the exchange. “Looks like you’re going to take after your worthless uncle.”
On a cruise, she develops a crush on Nikos, a crew member who “knew everyone and was known by nobody”. At university, her professor is fluent in 20 different languages but driven to the point of suicide because he has no one to converse with in his native tongue.
Later, as a teacher herself, the narrator befriends a student, Genie (the name is a little too obvious) who goes through life “invisible” to others, perhaps literally. Others encountered include an old man who spends his life combing newspapers for the announcement of the arrival of the Messiah; and a young man obsessively working on a book he can never finish, because perfection is yet to be achieved.
Read within the framework of the 10 lost tribes, who centuries ago melded into the general population, Yellin seems to be saying that modern man is detached from something essential, which cannot be recovered. As a comment on contemporary Jewry, the state of Israel is conspicuous by its absence from Yellin’s scheme. Surely the paradigm of the wandering Jew is obsolete, or at least profoundly altered, more than 60 years after the foundation of the Jewish state.
Self-described “Yorkshire lass” Yellin — winner of the prestigious $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for her novel, The Genizah at the House of Shepher — constructs her stories with extraordinary style. Read alone, any one of them is gentle and moving. But it is as a series that they have real impact, concluding with a terrifying crescendo of misery.
Miriam Shaviv is the JC’s foreign editor
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