Rooted in Poetry

Bernard Kops Returns to Russia to Assassinate the Tsar

a book review by Thomas Ország-Land (July 2012)

Bernard Kops, the doyen of European poetry, has issued a great new Jewish novel. It tells a fantastic and entirely believable tale with warmth, humour, empathy and depth reminiscent of the Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem. Its text pulsates like some pieces from the immortal pen of the Jewish-Soviet master Isaac Babel. But Kops gives us more even than his towering antecedents because he is also, quintessentially, a poet.

His story is about the present. Its characters are those among us whose forebears struggled through the great European migrations in the last two centuries and the many who chose to remain, and even the giants whose explosive imaginations came to formulate the self-image of much of the world in our own time.

The Odyssey of Samuel Glass
by Bernard Kops
ISBN 978 09548482 8 6

Like a fateful refrain, the menacing sound of Holocaust cattle-trucks clanging through the frozen Russian terrain, and the crying of the people inside, are audible throughout the narrative. But it is also a very funny coming-of-age story.

Its hero Samuel Glass is probably the only lad in all literature who manages to shed his skateboard as well as his innocence several times in succession, because he does so in his prolific fantasy, and then to lose a flesh-and-blood beauty next door to some lucky New Zealander.

Our adventurer turns up in 19th century Vitebsk, the town of his forebears, to confront his destiny but finds himself trapped in the wrong country and the wrong century of a confusing world. Yet the real world proves even more confusing when the sounds of the Holocaust horror follow him all the way back to the idyllic Thames Valley of London.

English poets know that in any copy prepared for public recital, the language demands a pause or at least one unstressed syllable, and does not tolerate more than two unstressed syllables, between two stressed ones.

A writer ignoring this may expose the text to awkward stresses of pronunciation or unintended pauses in the performance. But properly used, this formula gives us something like blank verse, the most versatile metre in the language favoured by Shakespeare and many others. Its commonly employed five-footed line easily lends itself, depending on the mood of the text, to the expression of anything from light musings to cutting satire or pulsating tension.

A long queue of ragged, silent and lifeless humans
were shuffling forward, one shoe at a time,
everyone trying to get away from Vitebsk.
The creatures in the queue seemed barely able
to rub two kopeks together. Where were they off to,
and why? As they approached the ticket hatch
some urgent whispers started to circulate.
The voices of the lumpen stragglers were
uttered a heavily pregnant Jewish dwarf.

And down in the hall, peasants cried and fought each other and tore at each other desperate to get outside.
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