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By Laurel Corona
 SAN DIEGO—“I wonder if you’d recognize me,” Eva Frank Shein imagines writing to an uncle in the closing pages of Joanna Gershon’s The German Bride. “I am freckled, yes, and I am both thinner and fuller on account of my recent pregnancy, but there is something else that I wonder if you’d see, something subtle and dark, like a patch of earth after so many fires, ruined, but also primed.”
Gershon’s third novel (Swimming; The Outside of August) tells the story of Eva’s ruin and renewal, beginning with her pampered life as the daughter of a wealthy Jewish businessman in 1870s Berlin. A family tragedy for which Eva feels accountable causes her to rush into marriage to a man whose only obvious attribute (beyond being Jewish) is that he is soon returning to his home in the American Southwest. The chance to escape a relentlessly punishing sense of guilt causes Eva to overlook how little she knows about Abraham Shein. She takes him at his word that he and his brother Levi are successful dry goods merchants on the main square in Santa Fe, and that she will have a beautiful home, suitable for the bathtub she insists on including in the crates she brings with her.
It doesn’t take much longer than the wedding night for the reader to see that Abraham will not make a good husband. Eva is stunned when she arrives in Santa Fe and discovers that the house he promised is only a dream for when he is better established. Furthermore, Shein Brothers is really Levi’s business. Abraham appears to have been taken in out of brotherly loyalty, but the tension between the two over Abraham’s shortcomings is palpable. Eva finds herself living in a tiny adobe hut in an alley, cooking over an open fire because the house lacks even a proper stove. The bathtub gathers rainwater and dead leaves in the back yard, a painful reminder of the illusions of escape she once held.
The sitution grows darker as Abraham’s control of his baser instincts declines. Eva’s outlook on life parallels this decline, going from somewhat snobbish hopefulness that she might be able to bring the niceties of bourgeois Jewish life into the rough and dusty world of Santa Fe, to despair that she cannot even manage kashrut, to resentment of others who are doing a better job than she is of making a life in the west, and finally to bitterness and fury born of the humiliation her husband’s degeneracy has caused.
Eva is naïve and passive to the extent that in the second half of the book the reader might want to reach into the pages and tell her to wake up and get a grip. Nevertheless, she remains a sympathetic character who is stuck in such a truly awful situation that one cannot help but understand her willingness to underestimate or outright deny her problems.
The other characters in the book are well developed as foils. Abraham’s fall from his already meager self-imposed standards of behavior takes place amid the temptations of a town dominated by the saloon and brothel. Easy virtue and the prospects of quick money to resolve debts sink him to the point
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where he no longer has a chance of redeeming himself with Eva by actually finishing the partially built dream house that mocks her so badly she cannot bear to walk by it. The author develops
both Eva and Abraham via interior monologues, and the reader thus listens to Abraham rationalize all his bad choices, while also listening to Eva as her spirit and even her sanity begin to decline.
When a young Jewish man slumps in the doorway of Shein Brothers, badly injured from a skirmish with Indians, Eva finds some solace in nursing him back to health. One day, she inquires about his pain, and he surprises her by asking about her own. “You’d like to know what kind of pain?” she asks. “As if I’m being stepped on…. As if I’m being crushed…. Sometimes I am afraid of being buried alive.” Eva is coming to feel, Gershon writes, “that death would come for her simply because no one in the world was listening hard enough.” Among those not listening at all are a French priest and a small group of nuns whose dour obedience takes the form of cold acts of “charity” toward Eva. When Eva first allows herself to dream of escape, she visits the priest who, sensing her desperation, will not let her speak, but instead gives her a lecture about the commitment of marriage and sends her home.
Gershon avoids overpopulating the book with characters, choosing instead a few family members and neighbors to create the social backdrop. Scenes with these characters show the contrast between Eva’s life and their own, and the nearly total isolation in which she has to nurse problems that appear to have no solution. Still, in the hands of a writer as skilled as Gershon, hope for a good outcome is never lost, and in fact the plot reaches an exciting turning point for Eva at its conclusion.
Gershon’s excellent characterizations and deeply moving story are matched by her tremendous gift for depicting settings. Eva’s childhood home in Berlin is so palpable the reader can almost feel the breeze through the lace curtains in an open window. Her arrival in the United States amid the uproar over the assasination of Abraham Lincoln is vividly realized, as is the agony of crossing the Great Plains in a wagon.
But Santa Fe is the jewel here. It’s a tiny town, with little more than a square and a few streets, and Gershon goes for small touches that make it far more real than tired images of swaggering cowboys and Mexicans in sombreros ever could. Set against the backdrop of the desert and the magnificent Sangre de Cristo Mountains, it is a town of stray dogs and blistering heat, full of the smells of garbage and burro excrement, the sounds of alley fights and domestic quarrels.
Gershon provides a glimpse at what for many readers will be a new aspect of Jewish American history. Apparently the Jewish presence in Santa Fe was substantial around this time, and the reader can imagine quite vividly how both desire and disinclination to retain old customs and identities might have played out in such a remote place. The German Bride provides an extremely skilled rendering of the world of the American West and the fit of the Jews in it. This book is highly recommended, and would make an excellent choice for Jewish book clubs.
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