As three young boys set off from Mezritsh with a case of bristle brushes to sell in the great market town of Lublin, wearing shoes of uneven quality and possessed of decidedly unequal enthusiasms, they quickly find that nothing, not Elya's jokes nor Kiva's prayers nor Ziv's sublime irritatingness, can prepare them for the future as it comes barrelling down to meet them.
With its matter-of-fact approach to depicting antisemitic violence, its three guileless main characters and its artful folding-together of fable, history and Jewish joke-making, this is a story for the moment and for the ages ... Despite the novel’s fable-like textures, Wilkinson places it firmly in a historical time and place.
Lublin is a mini masterpiece: simple, straightforward, narratologically complex, funny, sad and profoundly satisfying ... A technical tour de force, displaying what a narratologist might describe as a dazzling array of analeptic, proleptic and extradiegetic devices, or what the rest of us might simply regard as highly entertaining and effective zooms, swoops, flashbacks, flashes forward and asides.
[Elya's] dark jokes provide some of the novel’s most powerful moments ... Just as effective are the moments when the narrative jumps into the future to reveal villagers’ ultimate fates in a world moving fast toward the Holocaust.
