REVIEW: The Village Twins (The Village Life) by Izzy Abrahmson
Life in The Village is rarely quiet or uneventful, but after The Village Twins are born, everything gets even crazier.
Abraham and Adam Schlemiel are trouble from day one. The twins are so identical that their parents, teachers and eventually their wives can’t tell them apart.
Adam loves to create elaborate pranks. Abraham usually takes the blame. As teens, they both love Rosa, a wandering princess. But the Russian army is looking for Adam, who falls for Rivka Cantor, but she thinks he’s Abraham.… Confused? Imagine how they felt.
Every chapter will take you deeper into the Black Forest. You’ll laugh and smile, and perhaps shed a tear.
The Village Twins is a wonderful novel set in a past that never existed and a place you’ll love to visit
A delicious and exciting novel of confused identities told in bite-sized chapters. You won’t want to put it down, but if you do, you will come back to it again and again…
Dear Mr. Abrahmson,
The other books about The Village life of Chelm – a small village sometimes in Russia, sometimes in Poland, and occasionally in a few other countries given the politics of Easter Europe – are filled with short stories that knit together in various ways to tell a whole. All the villagers wander in and out of them and they can be read in any order. This book, however, is much longer and follows the lives of a pair of twins – Abraham and Adam Schlemiel.
We start with Rebecca Schlemiel expecting her first child as she and her husband haul the furniture of their small cottage around trying to make room for the lovely cradle that carpenter Jacob has made. As labor hits her, Jacob rushes off to fetch Mrs. Chaipul, the village midwife/doctor/healer. Of course things go wrong – it’s Chelm after all. Before 24 hours have passed, two boys have been born but to much different fates because of those pesky politics mentioned earlier.
I enjoyed being in Chelm again and revisiting with characters whom I feel I now know well. Abraham and Adam are mischievous boys who delight in playing (slapstick) pranks while their put-upon parents and other “Chelmers” use village wisdom to sort things out. The whole book is tightly plotted and the wrap up depends on all the previous things, many of which were mentioned two hundred pages ago. That’s fine and good. But there was also a lot of what seemed to me to be extraneous fluff stuff that sank like Mrs. Chaipul’s “lead sinker matzah balls” slowing the pace to glacial. I found my interest waning at times under the abundance of description and, at times, repetition. Perhaps from now on, I’ll just stick to your books of short stories. C
~Jayne
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