The Jewish world has so many layers beyond its pain, but tales of Jewish identity too often recount suffering with an almost liturgical precision—to the exclusion of its triumphs. Evelyn Toynton’s second novel, “The Oriental Wife,” is the tale of young Jews who flee Hitler’s pogroms for America, exploring the effects of culture clash without miring itself in that inescapable identity pity that asserts itself in similar works. As they struggle to eke out a life of substance in a strange country, these young people must deal with their shattered expectations and a new tragedy that will shake and redefine their relationships permanently.
Toynton’s debut novel, “Modern Art,” highlighted the life of Lee Krasner, widow of Jackson Pollock. Praised for its insight into real human drama and lively use of words, “Modern Art” was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2000. “The Oriental Wife” follows suit with an equally vivid story rooted in character and the subtleties of interpersonal relationships.
“The Oriental Wife” sports a tight style that doesn’t meander or spend too much time on needless details. For a novel that depends so heavily on immersing readers into the historical age of its setting, “Wife” does so with surprising economy of language. Historical novels can easily become self-indulgent, exploring every nook and cranny of a particular time and place so that readers become bogged down under the weight of it all. Toynton understands sometimes less is more. When tragedy strikes at the crux of the novel, that sparse language gives “Wife” a chilling, heartbroken quality.
We get an emotional sense of all that happens, not just an intellectual one. This is probably due to Toynton’s knack for frank, penetrating language. She turns simple phrases into important character insights and small conversations into wellsprings of feeling. For example, when describing the first signs of sexual awakening in her young characters, she opts for a tone somewhere between playful and affectionate.
“A little shock went through her,” she writes of Louise, one of the leads, “not pleasure exactly but an inkling of what pleasure might feel like some day.” As tension in Germany escalates, Toyton strikes a vivid impression of change and fear in the hearts of these central characters that twists these idyllic first images into the dissimilar adults they become. The emotional upheaval becomes a consistent chord throughout the narrative.
“Wife’s” greatest strength is its emphasis on personal upheaval, rather than the broader fateful events of that age. Few books on the ripples of the Holocaust capture the emotional essence of being thrust from an old world into a new one without running headlong into a celebration of victimhood. Thankfully, “Wife” is as much about change—cause and effect—as it is about Jewishness, so Toynton largely avoids the cliches of Holocaust fiction outright. Hypothetically, the broadest events of “Wife” and the shocks that undergird them could occur in any time and place where people have moved a great distance into a new world.
That isn’t to say that some of the hallmarks of Holocaust fiction aren’t present. Toynton’s lead characters struggle with survivor’s guilt, for instance. Thankfully, this doesn’t drive the narrative. Toynton dissects the social implications of the shift in culture with such dynamism and sincerity, it is easy to tell she’s not interested in saying again what’s already been said for decades. Her eye is on culture—and what better place to dissect culture in America than its most mythical city?
New York gets its own distinct aesthetic here, lovingly described as, “Pure theatre—a movie in a minute.” At times, the city seems like nothing but promise, a place where anything can happen, including second chances. At others, New York becomes a constant reminder of human dissimilarity, a stark war of cultures as worlds collide with every docking boat.
We see the strata of the city’s melting pot like tiny worlds for each of the ethnicities, all uncomfortably piled atop one another but clearly separate: “Phillip had quoted, in a mocking voice, the poem the Americans were so proud of, and told her of the signs that used to say NO IRISH NEED APPLY; some of them, he said, who had come to escape the famine, had starved to death in New York instead.”
Even small interactions get swallowed in the void of vast cultural difference. For a city that has been evoked time and again, Toynton’s take on the Big Apple is affectionate but wary. Both world-wise and painfully ignorant, Toynton’s New York is a teeming home for many, even those it does not understand. An excellent example passes early in the novel, as male lead Rolf becomes painfully aware of the gap between his upbringings and the cultured self-regard of many New Yorkers: “It turned out he hadn’t been to Tiffany’s either, or Saks Fifth Avenue, or the jazz clubs on Fifty-seventh Street (but she wished she hadn’t mentioned them).”
The plot is steady-moving, but much of the narrative tension comes from its interpersonal moments, like ripples moving out from a central source. As the novel takes a series of turns, we find that Toynton is not only interested in the plot points themselves, but their implications for the future. “Wife” is a rumination on cause and effect, a book that draws as much from what is happening as what may happen because of it.
“The Oriental Wife” has a lot going for it, from its conservative length to its sparse and subtle use of language. The way it fiercely conjures a world on the razor’s edge of change sets it apart from being dubbed, “just another Holocaust book” or, “just another book about Jews and modern life.” “Wife” hits the tropes of modern Holocaust fiction—flights to America, survivor’s guilt, etc.—but these moments feel like Toynton is getting at something else, some riff buried deep in the music. With an ear for lifelike, organic dialogue, “Wife” benefits from its genuine sense of realism and vivid cast, even if it brings to the table no new observations about Jewish adaptation in America.
John Wofford is a junior at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is the current editor of an upcoming interfaith arts hub, a Neo-Hasidic nerd and music journalist of five years.
