Towers to Nowhere

by Yakov Keller

Overview

Odessa, 1903: grain magnate Ostishin entrusts his confidential agent, the up-and-coming Feivel, with finding new suppliers and markets. Feivel's passage has been booked on the Martha, a state-of-the-art river steamship about to sail up the Dniester, and he is confident of embarking on a successful business career. But this is Russia at the turn of the century, a country beset by revolutionary tensions and upheavals, and where Jews are increasingly threatened by discrimination and persecution.

From a straightforward commercial venture, Feivel's voyage on the luxurious riverboat will turn into a series of adventures, some of them absurdly funny, some hair-raising. He will become involved with Tsarist officials, anti-Semitic rabble-rousers, Cossacks and Tatars – and with a great variety of fellow Jews: miserable beggars, sedate bourgeois and underworld kingpins, long-settled ancient Jewish communities with very peculiar customs of their own and Jewish refugees desperately fleeing the recent pogroms.

Some far-seeing people foresee that much worse is still in store for Jews, in this new Twentieth Century – but what to do about it? Agitators and recruiters of the newly-founded Zionist Movement go around, calling upon Jews to drop everything and become pioneers in the faraway Ottoman province which would one day be called Israel. Some of them are sincere idealists, while other persue cynical hidden agendas. But there are those who ponder very different solutions, lending this picaresque novel a science fiction twist.

Gradually, Feivel becomes – to his own surprise – the leader of a great mass of uprooted Jewish refugees wandering the land without a clear destination or aim. The younger among them are full of frustration and pent-up fury, liable to burst out at any moment - against Gentile or Jew alike. What can Feivel offer them, and where would he lead them? And how might Ostishin react to the loss of a great sum of money, with which Feivel was supposed to purchase grain? (That is, if Feivel ever gets back to Odessa at all…)
Feivel must also ponder an increasing series of interlinked mysteries: What happened to Shprintza, Feivel's beloved, who was suddenly abducted during a lovers' tryst under a streetlamp on an Odessa street? What is the meaning of the few cryptic letters he received from her, and will he ever see her again? What are the hidden plans of the affable Austrian Count who designed, owns and captains the Martha? Where does he intend to bring the growing crowd of paying and non-paying passengers on her originally immaculate decks?

Also: what is the Count's hidden link with the shadowy Rabbi Nachman – a great sage, spiritual leader of an isolated Jewish community high in the Carpathians, and also a mathematical genius and the builder of very strange machines and devices? What unearthly vision did Rabbi Nachman have many years ago, over the rooftops of Konigsberg, and how will that vision come to profoundly impact the lives of Feivel and his shipmates? What is Rabbi Nachman's Casino, where only those who have lost all hope can enter and gamble for stakes much higher than money? And what happens to those who lose – or are they the true winners?

Product Details

BN ID:	2940044404342
Publisher:	Yakov Keller
Publication date:	03/23/2013
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	684 KB

About the Author

Yakov Keller was born in 1929 in Berlin, Germany, to a family of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. His dimly-remembered early years were spent in a big house near the Alexanderplatz, crowded with many other families from similar backgrounds. "There were Zeppelins, airships, passing above our home nearly every day. They made a big impression on me as a child. Seeing that long graceful shape floating slowly and silently overhead is not at all the same as a noisy and speedy jet plane". In 1933, soon after Hitler came to power, a group of Nazis attacked the building. "I was four years old. I don't remember the Nazis themselves, at least not consciously. I remember a lot of screaming and shouting and people running up the stairs. I remember standing in the courtyard, and an urgent voice calling from an upper floor: 'Come up! Come up - now!' " That early Nazi raid ended with only property damage. Nevertheless, it was quite enough for Yakov's parents, Yehoshua and Sarah, to proceed with their plans for leaving Germany and moving to Mandatory Palestine.

The rest of Yakov's childhood was spent in Jerusalem. "I was a rather wild boy, often quarreling with one or more of my three sisters, rebelling against my parents' religion, running off with the neighborhood boys to wild games. We fought with the Arab boys who lived nearby, throwing stones at each other. Even so, under the British there was more daily social contact between Jews and Arabs then you have in Israel today."

He was in the last year of high school when the UN Partition Resolution precipitated all-out war, and Yakov was drawn into intensive involvement in the Hagana militia from which the Israeli Army would soon develop. "Jerusalem came under siege, I accompanied convoys bringing vital supplies from Tel Aviv. It was a very real war, we often had to shoot our way through, fighting for our lives. Then on the following morning I still had to go to school and the teacher asked if I had done my homework! It was surreal. I soon dropped out of school altogether. Getting my matriculation seemed the least important thing in the world. Later in my life, when I sometimes did the work of an engineer and was paid like an unskilled worker, I came to regret it. But I still don't see how I could have done otherwise in Jerusalem of early 1948."

Immediately after the war Yakov, a member of the Left-Zionist Hashomer Hatza'ir youth movement, took part in founding a new Kibbutz - Sa'ar...