The Little Russian

October 3, 2011
Sherman, co-creator of the television show That’s So Raven, makes an impressive fiction debut with an epic tale of war’s transformative effects on one Russian woman and her family. As a teenage girl at the beginning of the 20th century, Berta Lorkis is sent from the Ukraine, or “Little Russia,” to become a temporary playmate for a distant relation in Moscow, leaving behind her working-class Jewish family and becoming entranced with Moscow’s sophistication and wealth. When her relation is married off, however, Berta is sent back to Mosny, where she longs for the luxurious life she’d grown accustomed to in the big city. After a year of misery, she marries the wealthy Haykel “Hershel” Gregorvich Alshonsky, and moves with him to a more affluent area where they start a family. Hershel, though a merchant, smuggles guns and helps his fellow Jews fight the Russian peasants. On the eve of WWI, a smuggling mission goes awry and Hershel must flee to America, but Berta refuses to go, preferring her life of leisure and finery over the potential hardships of a new country. But the war consumes her wealth and forces her evolution from vapid snob to endearing survivalist. As the novel progresses into the revolution, the narrative begins to feel rushed, but Sherman succeeds with her epic, sweeping arc and auspicious period setting.

November 1, 2011
Sherman's stark debut tracks a fortune-tossed couple whose quarter-century odyssey encapsulates the plight of Russia's Jews. The novel opens with a gut-churning description of an 1897 pogrom in Little Russia (modern-day Ukraine). The 14-year-old boy who numbly watches a peasant beat his father to death, we learn, is Hershel Alshonsky. Seven years later, he catches the eye of Berta Lorkis, a restless grocer's daughter who thinks Hershel will give her back the comfortable life she enjoyed as companion to a wealthy Moscow family. Berta doesn't know that Hershel's travels as a wheat merchant disguise his activities smuggling guns for the Bund, which aims to arm Jews against pogroms. They have nine happily married years before a gun raid gone wrong sends Hershel fleeing to America in early 1914. Berta refuses to join him, thinking she and her two children can remain secure in the affluence Hershel's trade created; by the time she realizes her mistake, World War I has begun, and they are trapped. Scrambling to support her son and daughter, proud, cultivated Berta is reduced to a "house Jew" who digs up hard-to-find luxury goods and sells them to gentiles who admit her only at their back doors. The Bolshevik Revolution and ensuing civil war only make matters worse for Russian Jews, persecuted by all sides. Berta manages to scrape by and learns in 1919 that Hershel has sent for her. If she can only get to the American Embassy in Warsaw, she can save herself and the one child she has left. Sherman paints a refreshingly unsentimental portrait of a woman beset and a nation in the throes of revolutionary change yet still bound by ancient prejudices--so unsentimental, in fact, that it's hard to care much about vain, self-centered Berta even after she is transformed into a tough, resourceful survivor. Well-written and researched, but emotionally unengaging and probably not to the taste of those who like their historical fiction more reassuring.

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Starred review from November 1, 2011

When in 1903 Berta Lorkis is unceremoniously sent back to her family's village in Ukraine (Little Russia) after serving for years as the young companion to the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family in Moscow, she feels that her life is over. Then into her grocer father's store walks Hershel Alshonsky, an ambitious, well-to-do wheat merchant. The two fall in love, have two children, and enjoy a successful life in Cherkast. But to Berta's horror, she soon discovers that Hershel is a member of the Jewish Worker's League and supplies guns to the shtetlach to help them defend themselves against pogroms. When a smuggling action goes horribly wrong, Hershel must flee. Berta refuses to leave, and soon she and her children face unimaginable hardship and danger as the drumbeat of war comes ever nearer, eventually forcing them into a perilous journey to find Hershel in America. VERDICT Sherman's extraordinary debut novel plunges her readers into the bitter cold, deprivation, and upheaval of early 20th-century wartime Russia. Berta is a fascinating mix of petty vanity, devoted parenting, and breathtaking courage, fleshed out with cinematic detail that's both irresistible and spectacularly illuminating. All fiction readers will enjoy.--Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

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