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INVISIBLE CITY
by Julia Dahl
Minotaur Books, March 2015
320 pages
$15.99
ISBN: 1250043417


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

The invisible city of the title refers less to a city than to an extensive community of ultra-Orthodox Jews who in this case live in Brooklyn and who are less invisible than noticeably separate from the life of the city as a whole. Far from inconspicuous in their distinctive dress, the men in their broad-brimmed black fedoras and black suits, their identically dressed sons, their wives in long sleeves, long skirts, heavy stockings, their daughters the same fill the streets of certain neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, upstate New York, or Montreal, pushing strollers, a wavering string of small children trailing along beside. They are less invisible than unapproachable and a continuing object of curiosity.

The protagonist of INVISIBLE CITY, Rebekah Roberts, is the daughter of woman who briefly fled the constraints of her ultra-Orthodox upbringing for a brief relationship with a non-Jewish man. When Rebekah was still an infant, her mother returned to her previous life and Rebekah was left to be raised by a loving man, but one who was never able satisfactorily to answer the questions she had about her mother. Now Rebekah is all grown up and has moved to New York, where she has a job as a stringer for a local tabloid, The Tribune.

The paper covers the more sensational news - minor celebrities caught peddling porn, neglectful mothers, a hooker selling both hot dogs and blow jobs from a food cart - so Rebekah's bosses are instantly interested in a story she has just stumbled across. The naked body of badly beaten woman, her head shaved bald, had to be recovered by a crane from a Brooklyn scrap yard. She is Rivka Mendelsson and the yard is owned by a major figure in the Hassidic community, Aron Mendelssohn, her husband. Due to his prominence, the death is not investigated in the normal way and the body is turned over to be buried without an autopsy. Aron is not only a significant person in his own community, but the civic authorities treat him with considerable deference.

And so the murder (for that is what it was) would have been quietly handed off to the ultra-Orthodox community to be dealt with as it might see fit were it not for one Saul Katz, a policeman who acts as liaison between the force and that community and Rebekah, who is determined to find out what happened to this woman, a woman who could almost have been her own mother. She is further determined to extract what information about her mother that she can from Saul, who, it turns out, knew her mother when she was young.

One of the great strengths of this book is Rebekah herself, or to be more precise, Rebekah's voice, for it is she who narrates the story. She is superficially confident but internally a bit of a mess, with a digestive system that plays up when she is under stress. She's good at eliciting confidences and it doesn't hurt that because her mother was Jewish, she is too, though her ignorance of religious practice often threatens to expose her. So does her habit of using the word "Jesus" as an expletive. She knows that she must appear to be tough if she is to survive in her current occupation. But she also knows that her toughness is barely skin deep.

If any readers are still harbouring the illusion that working as a junior reporter for a big-city tabloid is a glamourous occupation, this novel will quickly knock that notion on the head. Julia Dahl has a strong journalistic background and has freelanced for a real New York tabloid, the Post, so she knows what she's talking about.

When I was finishing work on this review, the dreadful news broke of the death of seven brothers and sisters in a house fire in Brooklyn. This came about not as the all-too-frequent result of overcrowding in a crumbling tenement, but because of a faulty hotplate, left on low in the kitchen on the Sabbath to keep food warm until a stove could be lit the following evening. In short, it came about as a function of scrupulous religious observance. The irony is perhaps overly obvious, but what would not be clear to many readers of the tabloid accounts of the tragedy would be the fervent belief and complex history that compels this sort of stratagem in order to honour the traditions of centuries. While INVISIBLE CITY is clear about the burden on women that ultra-Orthodoxy imposes, it also makes an effort to explain the historical context out of which this community developed and why it is a source of strength for so many. At a time when religious fundamentalism of various sorts affects all of us to a greater or lesser degree, a book that can shed some light at least on one variety of it is valuable. If that book is also a well-executed crime novel with a strong female protagonist, then it is doubly interesting.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, March 2015

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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