Other Covenants

Historian Thomas Cahill, author of The Gifts of the Jews (Knopf, 1999) suggested that it was the Jewish people who invented the very concept of history as we know it. That we were the first civilization to perceive time not as an endless circle of life, death and rebirth, but as the flight of an arrow, on a linear path to somewhere from somewhere. In more recent years, Cahill’s characterization has been dismissed by some academics as a gross oversimplification, and that may be so, but I think it’s still useful as a metaphor. Because a single arrow implies a quiver of arrows, a volley of arrows, doesn’t it? What if there are other timelines, other histories, other Jews? Would they still have a covenant with the one God? I have explored these types of ideas before, most notably in Arrowdreams: An Anthology of Alternate Canadas (Nuage, 1998), which I co-edited with my friend John Dupuis. Arrowdreams was the first anthology of Canadian alternate history fiction, and I see it almost as a bookend of this collection, the first anthology of Jewish alternate history.* Both sides of my identity, Canadian and Jewish. I suppose it’s natural that I would be attracted to alternate histories, to the roads not travelled. Without being maudlin about it, I am the child of a h*******t survivor, my mother, Eva Shainblum. She and her family were deported from Transylvania to Auschwitz on the second day of Shavuot in 1944. There she lost her parents, Bela and Esther, and her brothers Paul and David. She and her sister, Ella, somehow survived for almost a year in the worst place on Earth, and upon liberation in 1945 were forced to walk home from Poland to Romania. Almost immediately upon arrival, Ella became ill and died, leaving my mother alone in the world. With this as my family history, is it any wonder that I crave escape sideways to other worlds? To other timelines? To the hope that, in the seething, quantum foam of the multiverse, somewhere, somewhen, Bela and Esther, Paul and David and Ella lived. And were happy. But it can’t all be about the h*******t, and suffering and misery. I reject the idea that Jewish history can be entirely summed up by “They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat!” And how better to explore that notion than by exploring other worlds, other times and the other Jews that inhabit them? As Andrea describes in greater detail in her Afterword, this book originated with a conversation in a car on a driveway. A conversation about the Jewish people, about historical trajectories, about things both good and bad, the horrible and the sublime. This book is an exploration of paths we might have taken, a warning about paths we shouldn’t take, and a celebration of the here and now, which may not be quite so bad after all, given the alternatives. This book is a love letter to our people, the Jewish people. In all the universes we may find ourselves in. Mark Shainblum Ottawa, Ontario, Canada September, 2022 *A shoutout here to Gavriel Rosenfeld’s The What Ifs of Jewish History (Cambridge, 2016), a truly great collection of academic counterfactuals; similar to alternate history, but with a non-fiction approach.