Anne Dublin. Jacob and the Mandolin Adventure. Toronto, Ont: Second Story Press, 2021. 226
pp. + 7 pp of black and white photographs + 1 map.
A novel for adolescents and young adults, with both a
Jewish and Canadian link, Anne Dublin’s Jacob
and the Mandolin Adventure deserves
careful attention and discussion. It raises moral issues which a good teacher
could help direct. As with her other
novels for young people, Dublin puts her characters—whose names, lives and
experiences are based on history—through the paces of important issues. The
last section, pp. 203-226, provides a guide to historical documentation, titles
of books and articles for further reading, a long list of acknowledgements, and
seven pages of photographs which further root the novel in Jewish history of children
rescued from Europe and brought to Canada before the Holocaust and its
aftermath on the people it affected.
The Holocaust lies a decade ahead of the narrative,
set in 1927 and 1928, and is barely mentioned except by implication. In their
little town (shetetl) in Poland, the
orphans face street bullies who mock their Jewishness, and their orphan status.
Poverty also marks their condition and a sensitive reader will glimpse echoes
of what untoward events will come within the next decade. Already, too, the
gates of escape are closing down, and when there comes an opportunity to travel
overseas to start a new life, immigration quotas block them from the United
States. By a small technicality the children are accepted to work on a training
farm in Canada. On the rail ride across Poland they start to hear further
taunts of Jew hatred, and aboard the ship that carries them across the Atlantic
those discordant notes become shriller.
The narrator, Jacob, is one of 38 young orphans taken
from Mezritch, Poland through Warsaw and to Danzig where they board a ship
across the Atlantic Ocean to Halifax. From there they travel by train to Georgetown,
Ontario, where the boys stay for training in farm labour and the girls for domestic
service. After nearly two years at the training centre, they go by train to New
York City and perform as a mandolin band in Carnegie Hall, the high point of
their adventures. Along the way they are transformed from Old World children of
a Polish shtetl into modern youths and Canadians.
But what lies at the heart of the novel are the moral
questions Jacob and his friends have to confront and find a way to answer that
is both legal and safe, humane and Jewish. A few smaller dilemmas come up when
Jacob has to face how to answer questions about his friends’ status as
orphans—the regulations for entry into Canada require that both parents be
deceased, that living relatives give signed permission for the child to make
the journey and that the would-be Canadians agree to play in the mandolin
orchestra organized by the orphanage in Poland and supported by the school in
Ontario. Jacob is naïve enough to make errors in these reactions and has to be
spoken to, as do other children from time to time, by their guardians along the
way. It is not strict adherence to the rules, however, that he learns to submit
to, but through circumspection to find a balancing of childish whims and
reflection on how to read between the lines and create necessary strategic
white lies.
The biggest test comes when Jacob stumbles upon
Nathan, who had not been chosen for the group going to Canada because his
father was still alive though estranged
from the rest of the family. He is hidden in a storage room aboard the ship. A
decision on whether or not to report the stowaway to adult authorities onboard
seems to be easy at first. Jacob brings his old friend bits of food and drink
for a few days. But when he notices that Nathan had stabbed his foot on a rusty
nail while sneaking on the boat, matters turn more serious. If Jacob does not
bring medical attention to his friend, tetanus will set in, which left to
fester could cause death. Though Jacob takes on the consequences of his
actions, he notifies the ship’s doctor, the leader of the orphans and the
captain. All this takes courage, since he himself may be sent back to Poland
for breaking the regulations. Nathan’s situation changes the view of how the
adult world can work through situations the young adolescent children cannot
conceive of, though Jacob especially takes on a sense of responsibility to his
very ill friend.
By the time, two years later,
when the mandolin players prepare for a concert in New York City, when they are
almost all decided upon staying in Canada after this visit in America, Jacob
has to deal with another moral question also related to Nathan. Overhearing the
adults speaking in hushed words about Nathan’s death back in Halifax, he has to
decide whether or not to tell his fellow immigrants and risk spoiling their
ability to perform at their best in Carnegie Hall. On his own, he keeps quiet
until after the performance, the success of which will ensure sufficient money
to keep the training school in Georgetown open another few years.
How Jacob reaches the decision
is an indication of his growing maturity over the two years since he left
Poland, and how he will shape the rest of his life, with the Depression
looming, the imminence of Nazi dominance in Germany, the coming of World War Two
and the Holocaust. Brief hints are given of the future for the boys and girls
from the Mezritsch, their adult leaders on the journey to Canada, the owners
and guardians at the training farm and the Jewish communities the mandolin
players perform on their way over and in the New World. Young readers should be
shown the way to connect this small story of a few Jewish refugees from the
disaster about to hit Europe and the whole world and the fate of the Jewish
people swept into the ugliest crimes ever perpetuated on them.
For adult readers, this is a pleasant, light novel
which offers some interesting background to Jewish migration to Canada, There
is no condescending to naïve young readers and no cloying sentimentality. It
might be fun to compare it to Louis de
Bernières’s Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a sprightly novel which
won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book in 1995.
