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Review
This informative, entertaining and uplifting book left a favourable impression long after I'd finished reading. Highly recommended. --Historical Novels Review
Product Description
Glasgow 1915. Set against the background of rent strikes, anti-war sentiment and a revolution brewing in Russia, a young Jewish woman from the Gorbals gains her first taste for protest and female solidarity. Her political sensibilities are fired up even further by a personal trauma that leads her to campaign for the betterment of women's lives in the city. But distraction from her crusade comes with a love affair exposing her to the prospect of a new life in communal settlements taking root in British-mandate Palestine. This novel is not only about a young woman trying to find her way in the world of men, but also the story of a new world for women opened up by socialism and contraception.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Early 20th century Glasgow provides a rich canvas for David Simons' portrait of his eponymous heroine, a militant feminist whose moral courage finds its expression in the revolutionary sentiments of the time.
There is a gripping tension at the heart of the novel - between a young Jewish woman contained and constrained by patriarchal society yet becoming ever more aware of a world beyond - and also a growing sense of empowerment, "the power of a united force ... of women together."
Initially, the city seems to wrap its sooty fingers around Celia, suffocating her, dragging her back in when it looks like she might escape its grasp. The landscapes are stark and brutal but, against a backdrop of war, poverty and religious intolerance, there is hope, joyous epiphanies to be found. Even in a city known as the `Workshop of the World', grandeur co-exists with grime. Celia's spirit soars every time she crosses the River Clyde from the family home in the Gorbals.
"She loved walking across Glasgow Bridge, passing over the tea-stained slurry of a river that divided the city. It was as if the Clyde formed the boundary to some fantasy land. Those broad thoroughfares, the tall buildings with their fancy facades, the gaudy emporium with their stretched-out awnings, all beckoning her to enter from the dark, soot-clad confines of the Gorbals on the opposite bank. `Come in lass,' the Second City of the British Empire whispered to her. `Don't be afraid. Come in and see the wonders on offer shipped here from our commonwealth of nations.'"
Glasgow may be a harsh, unforgiving city, but it is also one of opportunity. Solly, a young friend of the Kahn family, makes a tidy living from back-street betting; Celia's step-brother Avram - the central protagonist in Simons' first novel The Credit Draper - displays his entrepreneurial spirit by cornering the market in waterproof clothing.
And so as Celia gazes down the sweeping south-side boulevard of Victoria Road she has "a different sense of the city. Not the usual feeling of how it enfolded her, hemmed her him, cast its dark shadow, choked her with its soot and fumes. But how it spread itself out, gorged itself on the life-blood of the river, threw up its shipyards, museums, munitions factories and merchant buildings."
As the narrative shifts between the rat-infested tenements of the Gorbals to the leafy avenues of the West End and beyond the city limits, so Celia grows in self-assurance, her political beliefs transforming into direct action. The tanks roll into George Square and she rages harder against social injustice.
Celia is on a crusade but love and friendship is never far away - in the form of her coterie of fellow feminists or the dashing figure of Jonny Levy, a young Jewish doctor who is drawn to her independent spirit.
The novel's success resides in its balance, its refusal to resort to cliché. Escape is possible and change meaningful. It is an unflinching but uplifting portrait of a society beginning to shift on its axis.
There is a gripping tension at the heart of the novel - between a young Jewish woman contained and constrained by patriarchal society yet becoming ever more aware of a world beyond - and also a growing sense of empowerment, "the power of a united force ... of women together."
Initially, the city seems to wrap its sooty fingers around Celia, suffocating her, dragging her back in when it looks like she might escape its grasp. The landscapes are stark and brutal but, against a backdrop of war, poverty and religious intolerance, there is hope, joyous epiphanies to be found. Even in a city known as the `Workshop of the World', grandeur co-exists with grime. Celia's spirit soars every time she crosses the River Clyde from the family home in the Gorbals.
"She loved walking across Glasgow Bridge, passing over the tea-stained slurry of a river that divided the city. It was as if the Clyde formed the boundary to some fantasy land. Those broad thoroughfares, the tall buildings with their fancy facades, the gaudy emporium with their stretched-out awnings, all beckoning her to enter from the dark, soot-clad confines of the Gorbals on the opposite bank. `Come in lass,' the Second City of the British Empire whispered to her. `Don't be afraid. Come in and see the wonders on offer shipped here from our commonwealth of nations.'"
Glasgow may be a harsh, unforgiving city, but it is also one of opportunity. Solly, a young friend of the Kahn family, makes a tidy living from back-street betting; Celia's step-brother Avram - the central protagonist in Simons' first novel The Credit Draper - displays his entrepreneurial spirit by cornering the market in waterproof clothing.
And so as Celia gazes down the sweeping south-side boulevard of Victoria Road she has "a different sense of the city. Not the usual feeling of how it enfolded her, hemmed her him, cast its dark shadow, choked her with its soot and fumes. But how it spread itself out, gorged itself on the life-blood of the river, threw up its shipyards, museums, munitions factories and merchant buildings."
As the narrative shifts between the rat-infested tenements of the Gorbals to the leafy avenues of the West End and beyond the city limits, so Celia grows in self-assurance, her political beliefs transforming into direct action. The tanks roll into George Square and she rages harder against social injustice.
Celia is on a crusade but love and friendship is never far away - in the form of her coterie of fellow feminists or the dashing figure of Jonny Levy, a young Jewish doctor who is drawn to her independent spirit.
The novel's success resides in its balance, its refusal to resort to cliché. Escape is possible and change meaningful. It is an unflinching but uplifting portrait of a society beginning to shift on its axis.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a companion volume to Simons' first novel 'The Credit Draper', which I haven't read yet. I gather that there's some cross-over between the two but this reads brilliantly as a stand alone. Set in Glasgow during and after the First World War, the superbly researched novel gives us a world of rent strikes, the emergence of socialism and an account of early contraception, written in a superb style that manages to feel both of its time and modern. Simons does a remarkable job of inhabiting the mind of a young Jewish woman nearly a century ago. I read this in three long sittings and will be reading 'The Credit Draper' while I wait for this novel's successor, the story of which is hinted at in the closing pages. A modern classic.
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