The Little Bride by Anna Solomon (A Review by Sara Lippmann)

Riverhead Trade

320 pgs, $10

A great novel is everything. To live wholly inside something else for a while  — isn’t that why we read? Yet it can be tough to find works that sustain without the slightest unevenness, that rivet, challenge and transport, delivering on all fronts from beginning to end. Even favorites can fall into categories: masterful in language but weaker in plot, innovative stylistically but short on character, and so on. A clever, engaging plot may sacrifice voice, or the prose itself turn indulgent, turgid, narrative becoming a mere vehicle for the author’s research; still others may clip along brilliantly for three-hundred pages before plunging off the deep end, or simply sputtering out of gas. Sure, we devour them all. Novels provide a lasting and generous gift – so messiness is forgiven, we overlook the excess or lame ending, because as readers we have been taken somewhere, we have been called upon to question our world, our existence, to reevaluate our understanding, to think.

But then a debut like Anna Solomon’s The Little Bride comes along and offers the complete tidy package. From the opening scene – when Minna Losk, a 16-year-old Russian orphan, submits to an invasive and excruciating physical inspection by the staff of Rosenfeld’s bridal service – to the last page, when Minna, having left the harsh, beaten plains of unchartered “Sodokta,” emerges in the heart of Chicago, this novel is not only an incredibly crafted page turner, but a clutch in the gut. Rich in theme, fiercely intelligent, thoughtfully researched and stunning on the sentence level, The Little Bride is confident, controlled storytelling at its best.

In short, it is that rare gem of a book.

Meg Wolitzer said in a class once (and forgive me, I’m butchering) that doom coupled with inevitability make for great fiction, and those ingredients are felt immediately. A domestic servant in the debauched, formerly resplendent home of Galina, Minna is encouraged by her employer to become a mail order bride, with what somewhat backward logic. Minna’s mother has left, her father is dead, and pogroms are on their doorstep:

“When Galina first urged her to sign up for Rosenfeld’s – an idea that stunned Minna by becoming more than one of Galina’s passing fancies – she’d said, being married is like you can breathe for the first time. Granted, Galina had never been married. But knowing the opposite of a thing often seemed to Minna to be the same as knowing a thing itself.”

Her fantasy of American life on the arm of a handsome, wealthy husband is rudely awakened by reality. The passage over is rough. People die; go hungry. In unflinching, visceral prose, Solomon writes of one woman tossed overboard following a bowel rupture:

“A woman, falling, was unmistakably a woman. Her boots pointed like a ballerina’s slippers. Her dress flew up around her stained thighs. It might have been better, Minna thought, if they could have undressed her. If they’d make her naked, as she so hated to be, she might have been spared from recognizing the falling woman as herself.”

Stories about the immigrant experience, in particular the Jewish experience, run the risk of dipping into sentimentalism. But there is no trace of that here. The tone is precise and observational. In a single sentence, Solomon nails Minna’s vantage point, fresh off the boat, at the turn of the century: “New York is like being in the middle of a parade where everyone has been called home, all at once, in different directions.”

Minna does not stay in New York. Purchased by a man older than her father, were he still alive, she is brought by his younger son (from his previous marriage) to the wild, unsettled territory of “Sodokota” and a one-room house made of sod. Here, she confronts the daily struggles of pioneer life. Rooted in historical fact (the Am Olam movement of the late 19th century was designed to fund newer Jewish immigrants on their migrations West) The Little Bride recreates the homestead with painstaking yet humble accuracy, all in service to the story.

Solomon’s characters are irresistible because they are human. Smart, seeking, torn between doing what she wants and what is expected of her, Minna’s conflicts are ours. Likewise, Max is endearing, albeit frustratingly rigid, unappealing and impotent when it comes to farming, because of his history. When Max takes her hand, Minna understands the terms of their arrangement without self-pity:

“Maybe, she thought, he meant ‘love’ simply as an indicator of fact – the fact of the situation between a husband and wife to be. Like one might look at a bolt of cloth at market and say, out loud, muslin, just to have said it.”  She holds no pretense about sex. On her wedding day, she reminds herself: “Transform what you can….then count away the rest.”

An outsider, conscripted by her circumstances, Minna nonetheless must carve out a life. On the one hand, she learns to make do: “She knew that she loved them, the beards, the bodies, the men themselves. She saw them out of the corners of her eyes, she brushed them as she passed. They were her furniture. You could love anyone, she thought, if you needed to. And in a curious way, not in spite of her need but because of it, because she was hungry and trapped, she felt safe. “ But her desires for more – for someone else, for something else, entirely – continue to gnaw at her.

Memory is integral to the novel. As Minna grows up her attitude shifts, and as it does, she gathers the nerve to shed her past and its expectations. Once she believed, “memories were something you could and should choose to keep, that they would not forsake or smother you like real people or things, that if you cared for them, they would be immortal and fixed.” After time in Galina’s house, her hold on them loosens, and “she only sensed their missing, like one sensed a hair caught in one’s mouth.” Ultimately, Minna realizes, “memory didn’t save anyone.” It is this fierce practicality that enables her to move forward and into the anonymous swell of independence.

In a recent article for Tablet magazine, Solomon discussed the novel’s origins. Who ever heard of 19th century Jewish mail order brides in our country? The idea did not spring from divine inspiration, as one might surmise of such a satisfying read, but from a Google search – never a proud moment for any of us, but something we’ve all done. Solomon’s search for her name led her to a website about Jewish pioneers to the American West, which led her to a Jewish mail-order bride whose memoir was later published. While the resulting novel was spun purely from Solomon’s prodigious imagination, it is here the idea was born.

I admit, after reading both Solomon’s article and The Little Bride I performed a similar search – if only to fall down a similarly rich rabbit hole! – and found my name on the register of a spare Holocaust memorial, having belonged to a Latvian seamstress born in Liepaja and killed in Riga in 1941. Lippmann was her married name. Her listed alias was Sara Feiga – an odd coincidence, perhaps, as Feig is my married name. It also appears on “Each of Us Has a Name,” a site dedicated to remembrance, but without any further information.

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~Sara Lippmann is a writer living in Brooklyn. Follow her on twitter at ….~