By
– April 16, 2012
In his novel Magic Words, Gerald Kolpan of WNPR’S “All Things Considered” takes the reader on a colorful journey back into the post-Civil War American West. Kolpan’s hero, Julius, an Orthodox Jewish youth from Russia, is captured by the Ponca Indians, becomes their interpreter, and falls in love with their princess. When the Army forces the tribe to relocate, their tragic march on foot gives contemporary American readers a shameful history lesson.
Woven into these wholesome and instructive pages is a digression related to the title which changes the book into adult-only entertainment. Julius’s cousins from Europe are magicians who perform with wild theatricality and the help, to quote the cover, of a “murderous harlot.”
Some scenes involving the magicians and their followers include seductions, bloody attacks, kidnappings, druggings, passport forgery, and blackmail. Still, it is interesting to learn how the illusion of magic is created, and the narrative has a compelling pace.
For those who are not turned off by, or maybe enjoy high-voltage passages, Magic Words is good leisure reading.
An Epilogue tells us that most of the characters were real people, Julius became a prominent Jewish philanthropist, but one magician never did the evil things attributed to him in the book, and what else is made up isn’t clear. Acknowledgements, epilogue.
Woven into these wholesome and instructive pages is a digression related to the title which changes the book into adult-only entertainment. Julius’s cousins from Europe are magicians who perform with wild theatricality and the help, to quote the cover, of a “murderous harlot.”
Some scenes involving the magicians and their followers include seductions, bloody attacks, kidnappings, druggings, passport forgery, and blackmail. Still, it is interesting to learn how the illusion of magic is created, and the narrative has a compelling pace.
For those who are not turned off by, or maybe enjoy high-voltage passages, Magic Words is good leisure reading.
An Epilogue tells us that most of the characters were real people, Julius became a prominent Jewish philanthropist, but one magician never did the evil things attributed to him in the book, and what else is made up isn’t clear. Acknowledgements, epilogue.
Read Gerald’s Posts for the Visiting Scribe
Jane Wallerstein worked in public relations for many years. She is the author of Voices from the Paterson Silk Mills and co-author of a national criminal justice study of parole for Rutgers University.
