Dear Sherman Alexie,

Reservation Blues

Thank you for Reservation Blues which was recommended to me by a friend who knows I’m researching the Yakama Nation. I was a little skeptical about how a book about the Spokanes would illuminate the Yakama Nation, but I figure both Washington tribes share gripes with history and maybe, like Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews, their many differences are not as great as their similarities. In your moving and marvelous novel, one of the marvels you conjure up for the reader by way of magical realism is Robert Johnson coming back from the dead to bring the blues to the Spokane Indian Reservation. He inspires Thomas-Builds-the Fire, a young tribal storyteller whose stories “climbed into your clothes like sand, gave you itches that could not be scratched,” and two young friends, Victor Joseph and Junior Polatkin, to form a band they name Coyote Spring. We root for Coyote Spring to succeed, make them rich and famous, and liberate them from the rez. They could use a break. Victor was orphaned early, abused, and lives to bully, gamble, drink, and fantasize about money. His sidekick Junior, who’s supposed to be pretty smart, dropped out of college and drives a Bureau of Indian Affairs water truck on the rez when he’s not drinking and bullying. These two may be drunk, disorderly, undereducated, and violent, but, like Thomas, they’re also musically talented, loyal, courageous, generous, humorous, and eager for love.

Tribal Storyteller

 Audiences flock to hear Coyote Spring, but still, the band fails. Its failure is a reenactment of the betrayal of Native Americans by whites. The treacherous executives of the recording studio are named after the generals Wright and Sheridan who orchestrated long ago battles in one of which the tribe’s horses were slain, insuring that they would have trouble defending themselves, and offering unfair treaties. The band’s failure is also due, perhaps, to the fact that Coyote Springs is not a real “Indian” band. The blues and rock ‘n’ roll they play are not indigenous to them, but borrowed from another oppressed group. Even Robert Johnson’s efforts to help the band ultimately fail, perhaps because his own people still need help themselves.

Slaughter of Spokane Tribal Horses

Pundits and professors often lament the fact that so many Americans are ignorant of our own history. It is noteworthy that each band member, no matter how drunk or damaged, knows the tribe’s history, knows the details of hopeless battles fought and lost, treaties broken, spirits crushed, identities erased. Each of them knows this litany of losses, knows he once had land, a living language, music, and religion, and lots of life-sustaining salmon in clean and close-by rivers. And Native Americans do not overlook our entwined histories any more than Palestinians ignore the historic tangle that underlies their relationship with Israel. Your novel is enriched by the way you work tribal history and culture into every layer of your story. You capture tribal culture as it is: the drinking, the gaming, the perpetual hunger, the barely habitable homes, the complex relationships between the Indian and the white man, not to mention the white woman, and the overwhelming hopelessness.

But you also include vestiges of the tribe’s more vibrant and viable past. One of these vestiges is Big Mom, a modern medicine woman who embodies that past in her large frame and even larger heart. She uses their own past to strengthen the inhabitants of the rez. At the end when Thomas, his girlfriend, and her sister finally leave what’s left of Thomas’s ancestral home for Spokane, their spirits are buoyed by the presence of the historically significant “shadow horses”  resurrected and galloping beside their truck.

You’re a poet too, so each chapter in this book is prefaced by a song/poem that sets the reader up for the events to come. My favorite is the one that introduces the final chapter in which one band member is buried and another leaves the rez for good. The poem, a lament for the many who do not survive reservation life and a call to action, begins, “I saw ten people die before I was ten years old/And I knew how to cry before I was ever born/Wake alive, alive, wake alive, alive . . .” Hell, I know families whose pets live better than the kids born on the res. A lot better. And since I’ve moved to Washington, I’m aware of this inequality in a way that I wasn’t in New Jersey. Perhaps that’s because here only a few generations have elapsed since we waged those battles and broke those treaties. The wounds still bleed, the losses still hurt, and in Reservation Blues it seems as if those on the losing side still suffer from PTSD while we winners enjoy amnesia.

The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian

With help from storytellers like you, we Americans face the genocide that, like slavery, is part of our history. Your stories in The New Yorker and your award-winning books for kids and adults arm the survivors struggling on the reservations while informing the rest of us how America looks to its victims. That you manage to make this terrible mirror an engrossing and memorable read is nothing short of miraculous.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg

Dear Joan Leegant,

Wherever You Go

Thank you for Wherever You Go, the first selection of my synagogue’s newly formed book group. According to the book jacket your novel is about three American Jews who venture to Israel: Yona seeks forgiveness from her sister who is living on a settlement, Mark, a recovered drug dealer turned Orthodox but now losing his faith, is after spiritual renewal, and Aaron, a college dropout with serious daddy issues, yearns for acceptance. I’ve never visited Israel, so I hoped to learn a lot about that country and its place in the mental landscape of assorted American Jews, and I did.

You open the book with Yona’s arrival in Jerusalem’s airport. Your description is so vivid I can visualize the “sea of Hasidim in inky black hats as if a

Jerusalem Airport

flock of crows had swooped down and settled on everyone’s heads.” I can hear the loudspeakers “blaring in five languages” and the security officer’s clipped bark, “You. Miss. You.” Later with Yona as my guide, I visit one of the infamous settlements I read about in the newspapers, the ones built by Israelis in defiance of reason, peace prospects, and law. Again you make me see this immaculate and grassy oasis of gated and guarded security, an American-style suburb, a theme-park-like in-your-face place plunked down in the desert. But what Yona finds inside her sister’s house is not so idyllic. She “made out a front room stuffed with furniture and toys and

Israeli Settlement

mounds of laundry. The shutters of the back doors had been closed against the sun. Somewhere a fan cranked loudly. The smells of garlic and cooking oil hung in the air, and then Yona picked up another odor, more pungent, human. Diapers. Unwashed. Ripening in the triple digit heat.” Although I have not yet and probably never will set foot in these places, I feel as if I know them.

And I know your characters too, especially Yona who made a big mistake years ago and seeks her sister’s forgiveness and her own redemption in Israel. She interests me because I’m researching a book in which the central character, another contemporary American Jew about Yona’s age, also made a grave mistake years ago. She has never been forgiven by the family she wronged or forgiven herself but, when the occasion arises, she sees the possibility of redemption. My as yet unnamed protagonist will leave her home as Yona does. She will travel not to Israel but to a place right here in America that, like Israel, has a certain biblical resonance, a bloody history, and its fair share of violent extremists.

So as I read your account of Yona’s quest and the characters she encounters, I paid attention to how you brought them together, how you kept me turning pages, and

Fairy Dust

how you fabricated a meaningful and satisfying ending. I also appreciated how you allowed for Yona’s maturation as she lives out her story. When we meet her she is an assistant in an art gallery fresh from a trip to St. Martin in the company of the most recent in her string of wealthy married lovers. At the end she sees the possibility of a more meaningful job and relationship. I’m not sure how realistic her new romance is, but everything else in the book is so ripped from the gritty grim headlines that I welcomed a little fairy dust in the love life department. I say Bravo! And bravo too for the meaningful names you give your characters and for reminding us just how far-reaching the consequences of poor parenting can be.

Your novel raises many significant questions. Can a democracy survive its violent extremists?  How does a country atone for a history of blood

Oklahoma City, After

and betrayal? Can an individual human being find redemption and forgiveness for her or his own errors of diligence and/or judgment? These are the same questions I am wrangling with in my head as I research my next book. Thank you for showing me that they can be the undertow that powers a gripping and important story.

Sincerely,

Jane Isenberg