Marching to Zion

In her third novel chronicling the experience of Jews in the South, Glickman (National Jewish Book Award Finalist for One More River) captures the untamed Midwest of the 1920s and ’30s, when the Mississippi offered an escape route and unleashed biblical wrath in the form of horrific floods. She follows the stories of two young upstarts: Mags Preacher, a plucky black girl bent on making it as a beautician in St. Louis, and Magnus Bailey, the first person Mags meets in the big city—a dapper, smooth-talking black man who is in love with Minerva, the adopted daughter of a Jewish man named Fishbein, who runs the funeral home where Mags finds work. Glickman puts Minnie and Magnus’s love affair through trial after trial: “They hurtled along a primrose path strewn with brambles sharp as arrow tips, studded with insurmountable boulders, crisscrossed by poisoned streams.” In describing their downfall, she eventually focuses on the glimmering citadel of Eretz Israel and Zion as a paradise of tolerance—“a solution to all our troubles,” Fishbein says. But religion isn’t the only thing that stirs Glickman to fervor: she writes in a high-drama, no-holds-barred style when it comes to romance. The result is a preachy yet entertaining novel about sins of the flesh and the redemptive power of belief. (Nov.)