An Undisturbed Peace

Glickman (Marching to Zion) has written a sympathetic, well-executed historical novel. During the late 1820s, Abrahan Bento Sassaporta Naggar, better known as Abe, is a plucky, young Jewish bondsman working for his authoritarian Uncle Isadore at a trading post in Greensboro, N.C. Abe has immigrated to America to escape the anti-Semitic persecution he faced in London. While on his sales route into the foothills, he meets and falls in unrequited love with a mysterious older Cherokee woman named Marian, known as Dark Water among the tribe. After learning of a runaway slave named Jacob with a family connection to Marian, Abe journeys to Echota, the capital city of the Cherokee Nation, to meet him. In this tale of three ordinary, eminently relatable people, the author adeptly sets Abe’s story against the backdrop of Andrew Jackson’s shameful, greedy relocation of the Cherokees and the land grab of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The well-intentioned Abe makes two trips to Washington, D.C., and pleads the Cherokees’ cause in the halls of government, but to little avail. Glickman does an outstanding job of weaving to- gether the narratives of her three disparate characters. (Jan.)