The Way Back
Imagine a Chagall who works in words, not paint. His work is intricate, moving, whimsical, Slavic, Jewish, folkloric—but his colors are limited to black and white, with small touches of steel blue and blood red. Gavriel Savit’s novel The Way Back is a brilliant new addition to a classic genre: the hero’s journey to the land of the dead… and back again. (That, as all heroes and quest aficionados know, is the really hard part.)
It so happens, once upon a time, that the Angel of Death visits the tiny village of Tupik, an Eastern European folklore town full of ghosts, demons, imps, and devils, as well as villagers, where in the execution of his (or her) duties Death manages to lose a significant, if humble, tool. He (or she) is a dark, terrifying angel with comical quirks, such as partying, consuming large bottles of vodka, and dancing.
Two teenagers set forth on this dangerous quest, a girl named Bluma and a boy named Yehuda Leib. Their adventures unfold in exciting prose full of one-line paragraphs and roller-coaster run-on sentences, as they contend bravely with apocryphal phantoms from the shadowy zone where religion and fantasy overlap: Belial, Lilith, Mammon, and of course Death.
A finalist for the National Book Award, Savit himself names Tolkien and (mischievously) Indiana Jones as important influences. Neil Gaiman and J.K. Rowling also come to mind, as does Narnia. And readers aged twelve and up cannot miss the terrible implications, not at all fantastic, alas, of pogroms and genocide.
