Shlepping the Exile, the rollickingly dyspeptic adventures of Yoine Levkes, boy hasid of the Canadian Prairies, is an inside portrait of orthodox, post-Holocaust Judaism in a place that it never expected to be.
Svelte and supple as unleavened bread, Shlepping rends the shmaltz from Jewish fiction and replaces it with a pound of real flesh.
It's the story of Yoine, his refugee parents, and the Jewish community of Coalbanks, Alberta, between 1956 and 1959. Confronted with a dying people, an ailing culture, the perils of near-orphanhood and the allures of Sabina Mandelbroit, whose family doesn't keep the Sabbath, Yoine can no longer tell whether he's a human being or a loot-bag of conflicting traditions. He's too religious to be "normal", too "normal" not to realize this, and too much of a kid to be able to make any sense of it.
The book is due to be re-published in a new edition by St. Martin's Press in 2008 - in the meantime keep a look-out in second-hand stores for the previous edition.
