The Joys of Reading Aloud

In October I always commemorate Columbus Day/ Indigenous People’s Day with a post that refers in some way to the events of the 1490s that I wove into my Jewish historical adventure/ mystery series the Mendoza Family Saga, which has now been running for almost fifteen years with more stories to come. The key historical events, about which I wrote in the first short story, “The Green Cross,” and the first novel, Voyage of Strangers (2014), were the persecution and expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the Spanish voyages of discovery and conquest to the Caribbean, and the genocide of the Taino people.

This year I had the great pleasure of reading aloud in their entirety both Voyage of Strangers and its sequel, Journey of Strangers (2015). My first-person protagonist is young Jewish sailor Diego Mendoza, who sails with Columbus on the Santa Maria in 1492 in “The Green Cross,” which first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 2010. In Voyage, Diego and his sister Rachel travel through Spain at risk of capture by the Inquisition to join Columbus’s second voyage in 1493. They befriend the local Taino, come to admire their culture with its guiding principle of generosity, and watch in helpless horror as the Christian Spaniards destroy both culture and people. Journey of Strangers follows Diego and Rachel and their friend Hutia, a lone Taino survivor, across war-torn Europe to Istanbul, where the Mendozas have settled in the Jewish community that the Ottoman Sultan has welcomed. Journey also tells the story of Joanna, one of two thousand Jewish children kidnapped by the King of Portugal in 1493 and shipped off to slavery on the pestilential Isle of Crocodiles, São Tomé.

My audience of one was a transplanted Jewish New Yorker who lives in Austin, where she’s active in the local Jewish community through her synagogue. She also does volunteer work for the Minaret Foundation, a Muslim organization that is “making Texas better through multifaith and civic engagement.” She was already a friend when she started losing her vision to rapidly progressing macular degeneration, and I had the bright idea of offering to read to her via Zoom. Our weekly reading sessions have become a high point of the week for both of us.

The theme of cultural relativism pitted against absolutism and intolerance is certainly relevant today. The parallel between fifteenth and twenty-first century anti-Semitism in Europe (and America in the twenty-first) and the contrast between the fifteenth century relationship between Jews and Muslims and that relationship in our own time provide food for thought. When my listener laughed and cried as the story unfolded, I'd say, “That’s exactly what I hoped you’d do. You’re the perfect reader!” She'd say, “Laugh and cry and learn.” Her appreciation made me glad I spent all that time crawling through the stacks of the Columbia University Library to retrieve an unpublished doctoral thesis to get details on the Enderun School that shaped the Ottoman viziers and janissaries and followed the trail from a professor at Brandeis University (my alma mater) to a professor in Tel Aviv to a footnote to find out about the Jewish women called kiras who served as purveyors and personal shoppers to the Sultan’s harem.

In fact, as I reread my own writing aloud, word by word, more than ten years after I wrote it, I could hardly believe I did all that research—into history, into several different cultures and religions, into a dozen languages. I’m still in love with my characters. That’s no surprise, since character is my strong point as a writer. I too cry at certain passages, including but not limited to the parts that made me cry as I wrote them. Not unexpected either. It’s the storytelling, the suspense I somehow manage to sustain for chapter after chapter, that amazes me. That’s the part I was never good at. But as I read my work aloud to someone who is always astonished and excited at each twist and turn of the plot, always wants more when we end a chapter or it’s time to end the session, I realized that with these two novels, by gum, I did it. Not a single chapter sags. If it did, reading it aloud, I would notice and admit it. I wanted more at the end of every chapter too. This experience blew my mind.

Neither of us wanted this exhilarating shared experience to end. So once we finished Journey of Strangers, along with the Afterword explaining what parts of it are historical and the multilingual Glossary, we went on to the rest of the Mendoza Family Saga: short stories, most of them mysteries involving Rachel, still working as a kira to the harem when Suleiman the Magnificent becomes Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in 1520, that first appeared in Black Cat Mystery Magazine. The previously published stories can be found in the e-book Rachel in the Harem, along with a novelette about Rachel’s daughter among the Knights of Rhodes that first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, a two-timeline story from Jewish Noir II, a time travel story, and the very first Mendoza story, which appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 2010. But only my two favorite Texans—my audience in Austin and a certain editor of impeccable taste—know what happens in two stories yet to appear.

Review: Voyage of Strangers by Elizabeth Zelvin

It’s always nice to see writers try something new and different and out of their comfort zone. Elizabeth Zelvin, our Sleuthsayers colleague, has taken a big step away from her very New York detective Bruce Kohler and his friends in therapy and in recovery to tackle the lethal adventures and messy politics of Columbus’s New World voyages.
Most of us learned about Columbus from the famous rhyme and the annual school holiday. The rest of the curriculum on the Conquistadores focused on the clashes with the Aztecs and Mayans and on the destruction of the Inca Empire. But exploitation, pillage and genocide hit the New World earlier, with what became the disastrous landing of the famous flotilla on the Caribbean islands.

So devastating was the meeting between Europeans and the native Taino and Caribe, that very little of their culture now survives. Ironically, a voyage that set out to find the East Indies for trading purposes degenerated into a scramble for gold, and when that proved thin on the ground, for slaves.

Zelvin’s Voyage of Strangers finds a way into this now obscure episode via a character who is a stranger to both the Spanish crew and the natives they encounter. Diego, a teenaged sailor in the Admiral's fleet, has a big secret: he is an unconverted Jew and as such vulnerable to arrest and death at the hands of the Inquisition.

Zelvin says that Diego “came knocking on the inside of my head in the middle of the night, demanding that I tell his story.” The young sailor showed up originally for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine stories, but he hung around until she gave him a novel of his own. Voyage of Strangers begins with him covertly saying his prayers up in the crow’s nest of the Santa Maria, then returns him to the scarcely less dangerous Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, where the Moors have recently been defeated and enslaved, and the Jews, the next target, forced to flee, convert or perish at the stake.

Diego is protected by Admiral Columbus, a friend of his father’s, and he hopes to make money in the New World, thus recouping his family’s lost fortune. For the moment, he puts aside some nagging worries about the treatment of Taino friends and focuses on getting his younger sister, Rachel, safely out of Seville and off to their parents living in exile in Florence.

This proves easier said than done. Diego is a paragon of an older brother, but Rachel, though charming in every way, is a handful. She’s sure that she can pass as Christian, having spent some time hiding in a convent; what’s worse is that she’s also sure she can pass as a boy, and she fully intends to accompany Diego on the Admiral’s next voyage.

The novel really is in two parts, the Spanish segment, involved with the preparations for the second and much larger expedition to the New World, the dangers of the Inquisition, and the difficulties of traveling safely with a lively girl of thirteen, and the sea voyage and the delights and terrors of the islands.

The island segment is more gripping and unusual. Zelvin, who has visited in the Caribbean and knows tropical climates well after a time in Côte d’Ivoire as a Peace Corps volunteer, does a good job of imagining the lush island with its spectacular hills and waterfalls, abundant food and generally easy living. Alas, the beauty of the island is soon tarnished by the demands of European military architecture and an obsessive pursuit of gold that eventually corrupts even Diego’s admired Admiral Columbus. For a time, however, the brother and sister enjoy the freedom of the forest and the friendship of the Taino, whose generous and easy going culture will prove no match for rapacious guests operating in a completely different economic system.

Voyage of Strangers is very good on the tragic clash of cultures that ensues. Diego, particularly, is almost preternaturally understanding and broad-minded, although his own experience as a hunted minority does give him an insight into the plight of the Taino.

The story of the young people and their adventures acts somewhat to ameliorate what is otherwise an unrelievedly grim account of the conquest of the Caribbean. Diego and Rachel and their Taino friend Hutia are good company. The island, at least initially, is an adventure playground, and the novel, as well as its quite modern characters, is both suitable and historically enlightening for teen as well as adult readers.