The Severed Wing

Alternate history with a message: Janusz Spiegelman has become unstuck in reality. He is the protagonist of Martin Gidron's somewhat Vonnegutian alternate history of a world in which the Holocaust never occurred -- where a shorter First World War and stronger international socialist movement allowed the "long nineteenth century" to continue stumbling along into the twenty-first. So Janusz, a Polish draft dodger and undocumented immigrant, lives in the crowded tenements of Manhattan's Lower East Side, writing for a Yiddish-language daily newspaper. But Janusz has nightmares of mass executions, cattle cars and poison gas, and after every nightmare some piece of his world simply disappears, his reality gradually converging with our show more own.

This inventive concept allows Gidron to put human faces on the enormity of the Holocaust, as well as challenge the idea that it was somehow inevitable (an argument he addresses in a special Author's Note). He is also able to do some inventive worldbuilding, imagining what might have been if the Jewish communities of Europe, and their descendants, had been allowed to survive to the present. Accompanied, of course, by the casual anti-Semitism that the Holocaust made unthinkable, along with the decrepit empires of old Europe, their internecine conflicts, pogroms, and colonial ambitions.

While the setting is promising and the concept captivating, I came away from The Severed Wing feeling that not enough had been done with them. The book has relatively little in the way of plot, and mainly features Janusz wandering aimlessly (and recalling his earlier, equally aimless years in Poland and among the Zionist underground in British Palestine) to give Gidron opportunities to infodump his counterfactual speculations. While those speculations struck me as plausible enough, I didn't see enough of a narrative framework for them to hang on. Gidron just seems to be building his world up enough for it all to fall apart in the increasingly surreal final chapters.

Gidron also makes the alternate history beginner's mistake of having far too many cameos from real-life figures (from Bill Gates to Anne Frank, Paul Simon to Yitzhak Shamir) and clever puns (like the "Marshals' Plan" that kept Czarist Russia from falling to Communism). Having a few jokes of that sort is one of the guilty pleasures of alternate history writing, welcome in moderation. Gidron gives in to temptation and overdoes it, to the detriment of his setting and his story.

I can see why The Severed Wing won a Sidewise Award for Best Long-Form Alternate History, but I can't give it full marks. However, I would be happy to see Gidron return to the genre, in this setting or a different one, and continue to hone his skills. show less