From the Mines Onward – American Ending by Mary Kay Zuravleff

Yelena was the first of her family to be born in America, in 1899. When we first meet her in 1908, she is living with her struggling parents and younger siblings in Marianna, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town southwest of Pittsburgh, though in their isolated and impoverished circumstances, it would seem light years away, though it is perhaps only 20 miles distant.

Yelena's family are Old Believer Russian Orthodox, a highly conservative sect, which doesn't allow married women to cut their hair, dancing or card playing, though all the adults, especially the men, indulge heavily in vodka. Roles are highly defined, and the men and their sons, some barely teenagers, work in the dangerous mineshafts from the early morning hours until they stagger home for dinner and then drink themselves into a stupor. The women cook, clean, sew, and perform other household tasks in primitive conditions, and there is never enough money, especially after the men indulge at the taverns. Tension and violence, domestic and otherwise, is high, due to the possibility of a mine cave-in at any time.

The town is also strictly broken down into ethnic and religious enclaves: the Russians, Poles, Italians, and "Blacks" each have their own neighborhoods. The Russians have brought a strong anti-Jewish attitude with them and they, and the Poles, their Catholic rivals, still believe that the Jews were Christ-killers.

The children, for as long as they are allowed, attend school together where they are taught by an Irish schoolmistress from New York. Yelena and her immediately younger brother, Kostia, are two of the school's brightest pupils, but they are weighed down with chores. Still, they attempt Still, they attempt to learn as much as they can. Their mother, Katya, values education, and in fact speaks several languages, and reads and writes in a beautiful script. Her husband Gregor is illiterate, though not unintelligent.

When Gregor and Katya immigrated from Suwalki in Russian Poland, they left behind their two oldest daughters with Katya's parents. Katya saves and saves to bring them to America and once they finally arrive, Yelena's role in the household is forever changed, and she resents that. She is also forced to leave school before the fifth grade, though she continues to try to educate herself.

The book progresses through her remaining child and teen years, and her early marriage to Viktor, one of a set of brothers also from Suwalki. He was the eldest, born abroad, though his younger brothers were born in America, so were citizens from birth. Hard work in the mines, food allergies and asthma, which were not well understood, have made his health precarious. Like Yelena, he is as well-read as a person of limited schooling can be.

Yelena and Viktor press on to make a life together. They leave Marianna, eventually moving to Erie, where there is other work, but it is still a struggle with Viktor's poor health. Meanwhile, Yelena has become an avid supporter of the women's suffrage movement, and has a hero in Rose Winslow, formerly Ruza Wenclawska, a suffragist and labor movement leader, also from Suwalki.

In 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, and it was ratified in 1920. Yelena is at home with her two young children when a census worker arrives to interview her. The young woman, a college girl working the census as a summer job, is surprised that Yelena, whose name she Americanizes to Elaine, as a married mother of two, is just 20, her age. The two women could not be more different. Yelena tells her that she is a natural-born American but when the woman finds out that Viktor is a still unnaturalized alien, she changes Yelena's nationality to alien, much to Yelena's shock. The law of the time, it turns out, was that American women who marry foreign nationals were no longer citizens...but a different set of rules applied to men.

...that law was the Expatriation Act of 1907. It said that any American woman who married a foreigner would assume his nationality. The 1922 Cable Act partially reversed the 1907 law, but it wasn't until 1940 that all aspects of the 1907 law were rescinded and women and men had independent citizenship that could not be stripped away by marriage. These immigration laws as they applied to the period of this book were explained in an appendix after the last page, with the 1940 information here my addition.

This novel was also one of my Mark Twain American Voice Prize in Literature choices to read and rate. I hope it will continue forward in the judging. It was vividly written, deeply felt, with strongly crafted characters, and provided a historical and geographical context that made it highly accessible. The author based this novel on the experiences of her own family in Marianna, now, per Wikipedia, a town of around of 400 residents. A major explosion killed over 150 miners in 1908, and is described in the book. The mine passed through several rounds of ownership and eventually closed in 1988.

Passage to India: The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey

It's always a treat to find a "new" author, and then discover that they have published at least dozen books that you'll want to read. My "new" author is Sujata Massey, a former Baltimore Sun reporter turned novelist.

According to the book jacket, Ms. Massey's parents were Indian and German but she was raised in the United States. Her Indian background must have been invaluable in creating this first-in-a-series novel set in the Bombay of the early 1920s and featuring a heroine inspired by the first woman to practice law there. 

Perveen Mistry is a young woman solicitor from a successful Parsi family of lawyers and a business in real estate construction. Parsis are Indians of Persian descent who follow the Zoroastrian religion. Zoroastrianism dates back to approximately 600 BCE, making it more than 1200 years older than Islam, which overtook it in ancient Persia/Iran. In the 1920s, Bombay had separate religious communities for Moslems, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Jews and Christians, as well as Parsis. Each had their own parallel society and specific legal requirements. A lawyer needed to understand both the religious and civil laws to represent clients. At this time, India is still ruled by the British and that there is a rigid social and legal system with the white British community at the top, no matter how distinguished, successful and wealthy any Indian might be.

Two parallel threads form the narrative, one for Perveen's work and one for her personal life. They are cleverly interwoven in alternate chapters that move between her present and her recent past. In her present, about 1921, she has recently completed her legal studies and works in the law practice of her father on the paperwork for various cases (women are not yet allowed to appear in the courts – in the British and Indian systems, lawyers who present cases in court are known as barristers, while those who handle all other aspects of the law are called solicitors), and in her recent past, we learn about what happened in her life five years earlier, providing the background for her present circumstances.

One of the practice's clients is a wealthy, highly traditional Muslim family. The husband has died leaving three widows (don't be judgmental – remember that this is 1921) and several children. The widows live in purdah (religion-based seclusion) in a large villa in an exclusive neighborhood. Perveen becomes involved in the details of executing the will for the widows and the man who had been appointed to manage the business affairs of the family. On a visit to the household to conduct business, Perveen discovers that he has been been brutally murdered...

Not only does the novel solve this mystery, but it also introduces an intriguing heroine who explores the societal issues of the rapidly changing times in India, including colonialism and feminism, giving the reader a fascinating window into a complex, diverse and sophisticated culture, presented for maximum appeal with vivid descriptions of the locales, dress, food and more. It is a wonderful opportunity for a journey to an exotic destination in a just distant enough time frame.

Two Women, Two Stories: The Obituary Writer by Ann Hood

Ann Hood's The Obituary Writer alternates between the stories of two women, Claire, a 1960s wife and mother in the Washington, DC suburbs, and Vivien, a single woman living in Napa, California, where she is grappling with the loss of her married lover in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, thirteen years earlier.

Pregnant Claire is struggling with the loneliness of an unhappy marriage to Peter, whom she no longer loves (or isn't sure she ever really did), and its counterpoint is her affair with a man who pays attention to what she has to say. In those pre-DNA test days, she is unsure who the baby's father may be. Despite that, Claire and her friends are caught up in the hope and promise of the impending inauguration of John F. Kennedy, even to having a betting pool on what Jackie will wear on that all-important day. Claire's life has devolved into a soap opera, with all the clichés that implies.

Vivien is the more nuanced and revolutionary woman, especially given the society and period in which she lives. Her lost lover, David, was an older man, a successful attorney who provided for her every need in a beautifully appointed townhouse they had decorated together. He had left for his office the morning the earthquake struck, and she never saw him again. She has chosen to believe that he isn't dead, but suffering amnesia from a blow to the head, and that someday he will recover, and return, so that they can be together once more.

Meanwhile, Vivien has gone to live in the small town of Napa, where she has the comfort of her closest friend, and has created a career as an obituary writer of unique talent. She is sought out for way of bringing closure to others in their losses, even as she has chosen none for herself.

These two stories twist and turn until they inevitably come together, across the country from California and eight hours north of Washington in Providence, Rhode Island.

Hood is gifted at creating verbal pictures of her settings, and she has done a fine job taking us to Denver, where an amnesiac man Vivien thinks may be David is being cared for, and driving the highway (obviously the pre-interstate US1) with Claire and Peter from Washington to Providence in a blizzard, complete with a stop at a Howard Johnson's for a rushed meal.

There is a satisfying conclusion to the novel as the stories are unspun and become intertwined.

But... what brings this novel down are its jarring editorial errors. Calling one leading character by the other's name, for example, just couldn't have been intentional, and should have been caught by the copy editor. I almost put the book down when I saw that, but since I found Vivien so interesting, I kept reading, even though the end was not really a surprise, but still provided closure for the characters and the reader.