As I read Janice Weizman’s thoroughly engrossing Our Little Histories, I had the sensation of looking in a mirror. So many of the details in this novel are familiar to me from my own family history — down to the town of Mogilev, from which some think my last name is derived.
Notable beyond what is familiar to me — and what will be familiar to many others who are descended from Eastern European Jews — is the way in which Weizman turns history into a kind of detective story. We begin in the present, when a curator is commissioned to recreate a shtetl world for a wealthy Belorussian who has discovered his Jewish roots later in life and wants to expose his countrymen to what vanished Jewish life used to look like.
The curator enlists her distant Israeli cousin to play the role of Jewish patriarch, and the cousin’s wife and children fill out the rest of the family. Tickets are sold to attendees who get to observe this family living Jewishly in a glass display case; while the viewers can see and hear what goes on inside the display case, the family cannot hear or see out. The story then moves backwards in time from this restaging of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, to how that life was lived, suffered through, and scattered, all the way back into the middle of the nineteenth century.
The novel draws us in with richly hewn descriptions of how Jews lived at various points in time, all while peeling back the layers of how the various characters came to be who they are, where they are, and ultimately even why they are. We are introduced to men and women who struggle, who suffer, who hope and dream and love. Men and women who make awful choices, because no good choices are available to them, but still hope in the future even though they doubt they will see it. We meet Jews steeped in faith, and those seeking something they deem more liberating, who imagine and want to be part of a just and equal future for all. We meet Jews who are lucky, and many more who are not. Some characters surprise with their naivete; others with their breathtaking courage. Each one reads as a whole person.
One of the individuals who works on the shtetl exhibit introduced early in the novel says of those who will come to see it: “I think that all of the people will cry when they see this house. It is a house from our past.” Toward the end of the novel, we read about Raizel, a woman living a fragile life in a town full of sorrow and loss: “Though she is a mere ignorant woman, she senses that words, even when they are simple and unadorned, are where the true fire of the world resides.” The words that she leaves her young sons are their ultimate inheritance, just as the stories unspooled in Our Little Histories will feel as though they belong, on a fundamental level, to the reader.
Nina Mogilnik left a long career in philanthropy, non-profit, and government work to focus on family, on causes dear to her, and on her own writing, which she publishes on Medium, at the Blogs of the Times of Israel, and elsewhere.
