The Lake on Fire

August 15, 2018
Two young Jewish immigrants run away from home to make their way in the seething, harsh tumult of 19th-century Chicago.Life has been nothing but sorrow, boredom, and miserable hard work since Chaya-Libbe Shaderowsky's family arrived in their New World home, a farm in Wisconsin. When she realizes they are about to marry her off to the first nebbish who shows up, she hops a train. But she's got company: her 8-year-old brother, Asher, an extraordinary child with prodigal powers of language and memory, whom Chaya adores beyond all else. Arriving in Chicago penniless and clueless, the two are led to the Jewish quarter by a handsome young man named Gregory Stillman (perhaps this won't be the last we see of him). Taken in by a childless widow, Chaya finds work in a sweatshop manufacturing cigars; Asher hits the streets as a cunning shoplifter and pickpocket. Before long the child's stunning intellectual gifts lead to work as a party entertainer. The opportunity to compare the lots of the rich and poor, living at such vast extremes then as now, leads each of the Shaderowskys to a sharpened political awareness and a simmering rage which plays out with shocking results in the book's final chapters. Often praised for her prose, in her long-awaited sixth novel Brown (Half a Heart, 2000, etc.) sings as euphoniously as ever, whether she is writing about the filth and stench of the city, about the magnificence of the Columbian Exposition of 1893, or about love. "The first time Gregory kissed Chaya, it was just beside her ear, a gentle, oblique touching of his lips to the skin that astounded her by what it taught her of the connection between the distant outposts of her body, which had never before reported their existence." Among the historical flourishes is the appearance of Jane Addams--"she had the air of an aunt about her...committed to movement, [she] was not a proper noun so much as a verb"--to play an important role in their lives.A transporting drama of class and love, steeped in period feeling, written with beauty and conviction.

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Starred review from October 15, 2018
In Brown’s stellar, evocative novel, Jewish siblings Chaya and Asher Shaderowsky move with their family to America from Ukraine to work on a Wisconsin collective farm. As a young woman in 1891, in order to escape an arranged marriage, Chaya flees with eight-year-old Asher to Chicago, where she finds work in a cigar factory and he becomes a thief, modeling himself after Robin Hood. Chaya is courted by Gregory Stillman, a young writer from a wealthy background; she can scarcely believe that this gentile wants to marry her. Of course, their relationship causes problems with Gregory’s family. Asher, meanwhile, has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and is drawn to the new University of Chicago and the Columbian Exposition, where he finds employment. Radicalized, he attempts to help those thrown out of work by the Exposition’s completion. Uneasy with her new wealth and marriage, Chaya’s allegiance is split between the haves and the have-nots, even as she becomes pregnant and an act of terrorism threatens to undo her new life. In Chaya and Asher, Brown (Before and After) creates two memorable strivers. She transports the reader to Gilded Age Chicago and recreates the Jewish immigrant experience as incisively as Henry Roth in Call It Sleep.

Starred review from September 1, 2018
After fleeing anti-Semitic horrors in Russia, the Shaderowskys are barely surviving in rural Wisconsin, convincing Chaya that, once again, escape is necessary. She plans to sneak away without her adored little brother, Asher, but this wunderkind of rapture and calculation will not be abandoned, thus complicating Chaya's bid for freedom. Her dreams quickly shrivel altogether as she works miserable hours assembling cigars while prodigy Asher lives by his wits on the streets. In her first historical novel, an exquisite, suspenseful, and character-driven tale of two cities, poet and deeply inquisitive fiction writer Brown (Before and After?, 1992; Half a Heart?, 2000) takes measure of the divide between rich and poor during Chicago's resplendent World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Narrating from Chaya's and Asher's divergent perspectives, Brown describes with sensuous intensity the lavish lives of the elite and the desperation of the unemployed, the miasmas of sweatshops and the radiant fair, which decays into a mere facade. While Chaya is courted by a wealthy, wannabe socialist and employed by pioneering social worker Jane Addams, Asher, incensed by the plight of the homeless, strives to be an urban Robin Hood. In an astute and enrapturing variation on Edith Wharton's foundational Gilded Age novel, The House of Mirth (1905), and, in accord with Dickens, Dreiser, and Doctorow, Brown imaginatively, compassionately, and spellbindingly dramatizes timeless questions of survival and social conscience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)