“It’s like Good Omens meets Fievel, but queer.” Overlooking the fact that “Fievel” is actually An American Tail (1986), this is how I described to my friends Sacha Lamb’s When the Angels Left the Old Country (2022). Admittedly it’s not a great description of Lamb’s deeply nuanced work, but it does point toward some of the cultural milestones that will resonate particularly with millennial and Gen X readers: those of us who grew up watching Fievel and family survive the trans-Atlantic crossing and, five years later, head west aboard an equally dangerous train journey; those of us who knew and loved Good Omens (1990) before Aziraphale and Crowley were so masterfully brought to life by Michael Sheen and David Tennant. For us, Lamb’s novel will feel simultaneously familiar and wonderfully fresh. For younger millennials and Gen Z readers, I suspect that some of the gender fluidity and identity questions will feel less groundbreaking or noteworthy, yet nonetheless familiar and comforting.
And that is the overall impression one is left with when reading this quick-moving novel: Lamb’s writing, for all its use of Yiddish and magical realism and wacky angelic shenanigans, is so very comforting. Reading When the Angels Left the Old Country is like curling up under a warm blanket before a gently crackling fire on a snowy day (though to be honest this was literally the case for me). And yet this is a novel with the ultimate stakes: labor strikes, murder, care of the dead, the salvation and damnation of souls. So how does Lamb make such weighty topics feel so lighthearted? And does doing so problematize our relationship with the past?
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Let’s consider that second question first: because When the Angels is set in a version of the past, and because it deals with exploitation and oppression, there are naturally some expectations of historical fidelity. Of course, this is a story which uses an historical setting as part of its larger literary purpose, so it’s not intended as an exact recreation of a rural Jewish shtetl, a nineteenth-century steamer, or robber baron New York City—and yet there is a remarkable verisimilitude to the settings our characters traverse. Over that foundation of “truthiness,” Lamb lays a fantastical plot centered around the friendship between the village’s resident angel and demon, Uriel and “Little Ash” Ashmedai respectively, so in part the historical accuracy undergirds our suspension of disbelief just enough to allow us to enjoy the story without feeling the need to look up details.
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But there’s more to it than that: this is simultaneously a story about the supernatural study buddies and about Rose, the shtetl girl who immigrates to America; on the way, they question who they are, go through dramatic changes, and learn to accept love in its many guises. It’s a classic bildungsroman, with the added layer that sexuality and gender are not assumed cis-het from the start, and that Lamb takes seriously the philosophical ramifications of a sexless, genderless angelic being who suddenly has a gendered identity thrust upon it (Uriel’s preferred pronoun).
As much as today’s public discourse would like to pretend that “identity politics” and questions of gender and sexuality are a newfangled phenomenon, these are questions that humans have dealt with across time, as well as questions that Jewish scholars have long pondered with regard to the Talmud and other ancient texts (we don’t have space to examine Jewish angelology here, but it is a fascinating field of philosophical inquiry). If Lamb has done something new here, it’s rather in the way that they track Uriel’s awakening personhood, from an entity driven by a single divinely-imposed desire to a complex and nuanced individual with its own desires. Perhaps there is something blasphemous in this from a religious standpoint, but it’s also rather beautiful.
Uriel serves, too, as a cypher through which to understand the rest of the characters, as well as Lamb’s larger project: all of them have been told who they are by others their whole lives, but through this outward journey of exploration they also undergo an inward exploration (a la Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey) that mirrors Lamb’s question to readers: who are we when we gain enough distance from our past, when we finally stop listening to what we’ve been told we should be, and listen to that small voice inside ourselves that’s been singing its own song all along?
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This, for me, is the value of all literature, but especially of speculative fictions like When the Angels Left the Old Country: they create a little bit of space, give readers just enough distance, that we can look at ourselves anew. The journey of Uriel, Little Ash, and Rose becomes the inward journey of the reader, and that’s a lovely thing to experience. So yes, Lamb does problematize our relationship with the past, but in the best of ways: by reminding us that the people who lived then were no less complex—no less repressed or desirous, contradictory or confused—than those of us alive today, Lamb creates a dialogue with the past wherein we see it more completely and as a result also see ourselves more clearly.
And yet, as noted above, there is a definite comforting tone to this book, as though the narrative all along is tucking us under the covers and patting our heads, reassuring us that all will be okay. The dangers Uriel and Little Ash face come across more as hijinks than nail-biters: Little Ash nearly has his soul eaten by another, more powerful demon (one of the Ellis Island doctors, in a resonant depiction of the historical exploitation that went on there); Uriel is shot and wounded; Rose and her cousin Essie are preyed upon by an unscrupulous factory boss and his hired thugs; but none of this ever feels as tense as it might in a thriller, because writing an exciting page-turner is not Lamb’s primary goal. Instead, they seek to affirm the interiority of their protagonists—and there is an undeniable comfort in that.
This is not to say the book lacks profundity (see above), or that it avoids weighty emotional moments. In one of the more poignant scenes, the newly individualized Uriel becomes aware of the plight of the working poor while at a strike meeting: “The words filled it up and soaked into its heart, and it thought to itself, all of this time I have been missing something, and I had no idea. Its heart was heavier with the weight of the young worker’s words. But should a heart not be heavy, in a world full of injustice?” (p. 274). Uriel then laments that its angelic mono-focus prevented it from becoming aware of all the suffering around it until now. Lamb aims to show how the exploitation of workers is an injury upon their identity. What sets them apart from muckraking writers like Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck is that their interest is not ultimately set on exposing the wretched conditions of the working class (if it were, they would’ve chosen a more contemporary setting), but rather on an oppression which limits freedom and the full flourishing of human life—and that’s a lesson which translates as readily to the contemporary office, classroom, and machine floor as it does to the protest line.
It’s important that we are able to feel represented in the books we read so that we don’t live our lives assuming the best stories always happen to other people, that we’re at best secondary characters in our own lives. Accordingly, much of the well-deserved buzz that this book has excited has focused on the queer and Jewish elements of the text. But it’s also important, of course, that we read stories about other people, especially if we are accustomed to reading books about people like ourselves. Any singular reading will be somewhat limiting, as if to suggest that a book will (only) appeal to those who identify as Jewish, queer, or both, or only have a particular relevance or argument. Because at its best, literature uses particulars to represent the universal. I don’t identify as queer or Jewish; I’m not angelic or demonic. But these characters resonated deeply with me because I went on a journey with them: their struggle to find themselves is a universal conflict we all must face in one form or another. When The Angels Left The Old Country can feel very comforting. But reaching across time, across sexual and cultural barriers, and pointing right at the heart of the human condition—that’s powerful stuff indeed.
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHEN
