One of the reasons I love writing cookbooks is that they have discreet parts. I can construct a recipe — or even a chapter of recipes — without worrying about planning a whole book at once.
One doesn’t think of fiction as working that discreetly. And yet the new novel, “Sometimes an Island,” (Sea Crow Press, 180 pages, $19.95) by Ellen Meeropol of Northampton is composed of multiple distinct parts.
The book is composed of a patchwork of related stories. All touch on the descendants of Jewish immigrants who settled on an island in Penobscot Bay in Maine in the early 1900s.
Fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe, those immigrants were forced to reinvent their lives and re-create community after catastrophe.
As the book progresses, their descendants learn to do the same in various forms. Most of the book takes place in the 2010s and 2020s as these Americans face a different kind of crisis as climate refugees.
Meeropol posits a “great undoing” in 2029 that floods coastal areas and destroys infrastructure and much culture in this country. A few of the original immigrants’ progeny — who have obviously left their original island homes — survive.
Like their forebears, they retain myriad memories but only a few loved ones and belongings. They, too, must learn to rebuild their lives and develop new communities.
While reading “Sometimes an Island,” I was glad of the family tree at the book’s beginning; occasionally, I lost track of who was related to whom and how. Even so, the stories work well together, washing over readers like the water that threatens — and eventually manages — to overwhelm the characters.
The stories are sad at many points. Readers don’t actually meet the original settlers on Penobscot Bay. Nevertheless, the story of Deborah, who came to the United States as a youngster after her mother was raped and killed in the old country, is never far from her descendants’ minds.
Her granddaughter Esther even channels Deborah’s feelings and memories mentally in old age. And the nesting dolls that young Deborah brought to these shores are a cherished possession, representing family and continuity in times when both are being fragmented.
Even as deep sadness and even despair pervade the book, in the end, “Sometimes an Island,” becomes cautiously optimistic.
Despite all the woes and disasters visited upon the original refugees’ descendants, small patches of kindness and community re-emerge. The book is thus both a warning about humans’ failings and an expression of faith in our resilience.
Meeropol will read from “Sometimes an Island” and talk about the book with novelist Jacqueline Sheehan at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley on Wednesday, March 25 at 7 p.m. Meeropol has a number of other appearances lined up; visit https://www.ellenmeeropol.com/events.htm for details.
Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning writer and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.