Towers to Nowhere

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?