Debut novel wraps Civil War tale
with engaging twists

by David Loftus

[A version of this review appeared in the
Oregonian on July 15, 2007.]

Peter Charles Melman's debut novel walks some well-worn paths. A Confederate soldier, age 20 and only 9 days into the service, has enlisted to escape a rough past with a street gang and a murder.

An older man gifts him with approval and life wisdom. An epistolary romance with a girl back in New Orleans bodes well for the future.

But each familiar component has a twist.

For one thing, young Elias Abrams is Jewish. He met his closest pal, Simon Wolfe of the ruthless Cypress Stump Boys, in the Jewish Widows and Orphans Home, though neither practices or even knows much about their religion.

Elias's father was a wealthy plantation owner who seduced and abandoned his immigrant mother. Though based in the city, mother Gerta taught him much about herbal remedies before her death when Elias was 12.

His surrogate father in the field is neither a Jew nor a seasoned veteran of battle, but a near-sighted, newly enlisted classics professor who cites Greek myths and writes literary pastiches to his wife and daughters back home. To keep the boy on his toes, a pair of cynical thugs who wear the same uniform have it in for him.

When the commander of his infantry company receives morale-boosting letters for boys in the field from the New Orleans congregation of the Dispersed of Judah, he picks out Elias as a "son of the tribe" and hands him a missive of elegant good wishes from a complete stranger, 17-year-old Nora Bloom.

On the one hand, Elias suspects both the law and his former gang buddies are looking for him in connection with the murder; on the other, the polite and inquisitive Miss Bloom poses an increasingly strong motivation to return to the city.

Melman's tale is meticulously researched, but the details of his narrative -- the lay of the Missouri and Arkansas battlefields, the rush and roar of battle, the delicate waltz and lingo of innocent young love -- only season it; they do not bury it.

On the surface, the plot might resemble that of an old-fashioned romance novel. Elias bravely wields his courting pen, accepts challenges and responsibilities, and stumbles his way toward redemption for his murky and thieving past.

But there are also some gritty modern elements: searing though not lengthy battle scenes, plenty of salty language, and flashes of violence and eroticism (never, fortunately, together) that may add to or detract from the story, depending on the reader's taste.

The Cypress Stump Boys sequences remind one of nothing so much as Scorsese's "Gangs of New York." There's even a sequence of anti-Semitic torture in a prisoner-of-war camp.

A calm, sagacious narrative voice guides us through it all: "…Abrams tends to prefer the character of women to men. Women fail, they know this, and he finds them beautiful in their admission of it. It is the casual resilience born of this admission that men do not share."

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