On the Sickle’s Edge by Neville D. Frankel is a novel following generations of Russian Jews and their struggle with their religion, society and economic system. Mr. Frankel was born in South Africa and immigrated to Boston.

The book follows three generations of the same family, trapped in the USSR. Lena, born in South Africa and brought back to Russia, only to find herself stuck there. Darya, Lena’s granddaughter and a true believer in Communism who is becoming disillusioned with the system she loves. Steven, a Boston painter who accidently stumbles into a family he doesn’t know.

I liked almost everything about On the Sickle’s Edge by Neville D. Frankel. The novel is ambitious, flows well, and interesting to read. I’m always up for a good book, especially one with Jewish themes in Eastern Europe.

The author tells a powerful story and doesn’t shy away from geopolitical events and the impact they had on people. The narrative is very absorbing and powerful, I was especially fascinated to read how decisions in the upper echelons of government impact the little person on the street who just wants a good job and a warm meal.

I did not care for the ending though, it did not fit the narrative the author built. The story turned from a wonderful family saga, into an action/adventure story which I found to be a very strange choice.

The cover is also a strange choice, I usually don’t pay much attention to covers but this one seemed strange. Usually I judge whether or not I’d pick up a book in the store or a library by its cover (for example, I know to stay away from romance books because of the covers, that way I don’t waste my time reading synopsis of book I’m most likely not going to like), this one though I would pass by. For a book about generations of Russian Jews, a picture depicting Jesus on the cover seems strange.

Ending aside, I really did enjoy this novel. The saga the novel tells is fascinating and exciting, even though the novel is a bit long, it’s hard to put down.

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I took a Russian-Soviet Life class in high school. We read both Russian and Soviet dissident writers as well as learning the history of this massive country and its peoples. I took two years of Russian which left me able to count to ten and insult people. I took Russian history classes in college. Go ahead and ask me about Peter the Great! Obviously I have been intrigued by Russia for a long time. I was less interested in the country in its incarnation as the USSR though, despite the second half of that history/literature class I had in high school. There was just something about the institutionalized grimness that appealed to me far less than the glamour of the tsars and tsarinas (yes, I plain old ignored the plight of the serfs). But over the many years since I was in school, I have picked up more and read more about this fascinating part of the world, once so closed off and now so prominent in our own currentpolitical situation. The grimness of life in the USSR is still not my favorite part of history but I am more open to it than I ever used to be so I was intrigued by the idea behind Neville Frankel's novel On the Sickle's Edge.

Lena's family were Latvian Jews. Her father fled to South Africa after deserting from the tsar's army. His wife and children made the journey later and it was in South Africa that Lena and her twin brother were born. Their mother died in childbirth and this tragedy ultimately drove their father to take his three youngest children back to their village in Illuxt. He left the two oldest boys, young teens, in South Africa as he didn't have the funds to pay for so many passages back to Russia. The separation was intended to be temporary but the First World War and then the Russian Revolution exploded, making the family's split permanent. The narrative then follows Lena and her family as they give up Judaism in the hopes of making their way in the new communist Moscow. Eventually the story includes Darya, Lena's granddaughter who marries a man determined to rise in the ranks of the KGB but who is herself questioning what she sees in the party, and Steven, the grandson of one of Lena's South American brothers, now living and working in Boston as an artist and a teacher.

The novel opens with Steven crouched in a clump of trees holding a gun and watching a dacha. From that tense initial image, the narrative of these three generations moves back in time to 1898 to tell the story of this family who escaped, returned, and was trapped in the oppressive USSR to make a living as best they could. It ranges from the tsars to perestroika and glasnost. The bulk of the story is Lena's and she is by far the most interesting of the characters. Frankel does a pretty good job weaving the political happenings of this gigantic country into the lives of his characters, showing the actual effects of policies on the masses. When the novel follows Lena, it is clearly a historical novel but when Darya and Steven become more the focus, it shifts gears into an almost pure political thriller rife with danger, sex, murder, and betrayal. The split is an uneasy one and leaves the reader wondering what the book is supposed to be as it is neither one nor the other. The small details, like the difference in food available to those who are merely workers and those who are party officials, expose the flawed society quite clearly. The atmosphere of the novel feels right and the generational story is interesting over all if too long.

Although the story was generally good enough, it was a bit ponderous and I never quite felt fully immersed in it so when I came across details that were wrong, well, I couldn't stop myself from noting them. Darya's eye color when Lena meets her goes from being the same startling green as her grandfather's to being brown when Steven later describes them. Late in the novel Lena is surprised by Steven's resemblance to her father and his great-grandfather so she shows him a picture of the family. In it are her father, his wife, her older brothers and sister, and Lena and her twin. The problem is that Lena's mother died giving birth to Lena and her brother and her stepmother was never in a photo with the oldest boys who were left behind in South Africa before she and their father married. Darya and Steven are described in the novel as being distant cousins but based on the family tree at the beginning of the novel, they are actually only second cousins, not terribly distant at all as their grandparents were siblings. Small mistakes for sure, but ones that pulled this reader out of the tale. Couple these mistakes with the strange thriller-y turn the novel took in the last third to quarter of the book and it didn't work for me quite as well as I had hoped. Others have really loved it though so perhaps you should try it for yourself. ( )