If you aren’t yet familiar with the novel, A Far Piece to Canaan, by Sam Halpern, you’re in for an unforgettable reading
experience.
This book, although a novel, reads like a memoir. The first-person
narrative keeps you riveted to the page.
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| Used by permission of Harper Collins and author |
You can read Canaan
on many levels. First, there is the pure joy of being immersed in rural
Kentucky of the 1940s. For anyone with an interest in family history, this is a
visit to a by-gone time and place that you won’t want to miss.
When you read Canaan,
you get a glimpse of daily life seventy years ago in a small farming community
where everyone (except the few landlords) is trying to eke out a living by
sharecropping. Although extreme poverty hangs over the community, this seems to help bring
people together. We watch neighbors come together at revival meetings, during
plantings and harvests when someone is injured or falls sick, and when their
stock
is threatened by an unknown peril.
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Sheep grazing
on farm of Russell Spears near Lexington, Kentucky,
Wolcott, Marion Post, 1910-1990, photographer,
[1940 Sept.?], LC-USF33-031128-M1,
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
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The main character is Samuel Zelinsky, who at the outset is the
twelve-year old son of a Jewish couple, Morris and Liz Zelinsky. Morris is a
sharecropper, and the novel begins when the family moves to an area “fifteen
miles south of Lexington, Kentucky” to begin three years of cropping on Mr.
Berman’s farm. You can read Canaan as
a “coming of age” story. Halpern weaves an interlocking tale of a group of
young boys who have fun doing things that kids today often miss out on as they
build friendships. But the group also finds out that life can put you into
situations where you are torn between loyalty and doing what’s right.
Halpern appeals to all of our senses as he paints a picture
of Kentucky:
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ForestWander
Nature Photography, Wikimedia.
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The brown hills turned dark green and the apple trees busted out in pink-white. The creek in the hollow below the tobacco barn
settled back inside its banks and it was a
great feeling to belly down beside it and listen to its sounds and let the sun
beat down on my back and smell the grass and warm, black, soft, moist ground.”
p. 21
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Field of
Burley tobacco on farm of Russell Spears,
drying and curing barn
in the
background, vicinity of Lexington, Ky.,
photographer, 1940 Sept.,
LC-DIG-fsac-1a34368, Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs Division
Washington, D.C. 20540
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Canaan is also a
testament to the American Dream of owning your own piece of land. Genealogists who study early America from the
mid-1600s through the early 1900s are familiar with the hunger for land that resulted
in people spreading across this continent. I believe this “land rush” lasted
longer and had more effect on the making of America than almost any other
phenomenon.
By the time Samuel Zelinsky’s family came to Kentucky, the
time of land patents, homestead acts, land rushes and military bounty land warrants was
long gone. You had to have resources to buy land in the 1940s and after the
Great Depression of the past decade, many people had very few.
Canaan gives us a chance to see the scourges
of this poverty up-front as the families in this story are all barely making it
from season to season. They often see their profits eaten up by what the
landlord claims and by what bad weather does to their crops. But what keeps
them going is the hope that sometime in the future, with lots of hard work and
luck, they might be able to save some dollars for a down payment on their own
few acres.
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Willie Nall,
11 years old; Raymond Jones, 10 years old; Denver Jones,
5 years old; plowing
on farm, …Elizabethtown vicinity,
1916 May 5,
LC-DIG-nclc-00399, Library of Congress Prints
and Photographs Division
Washington, DC 20540 USA
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For those genealogists who wonder, and I think that includes
all of us, how childhood circumstances affected our ancestors in their adult
lives, Canaan lets us look over
Samuel Zelinsky’s shoulder as he interacts with his peers on neighboring farms.
We learn about the values that Samuel internalizes from his day-to-day
socialization, some from his parents but mostly from the boys who become his
friends. And Canaan’s author gives us
the opportunity to see how this early part of Samuel’s life plays a part in his
efforts in later life to fit in in college and the workplace.
The book also touches on the themes of immigration and
religious persecution. The Zelinsky family is Jewish, and Morris was sent to
America from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s to escape pogroms. But he found that even in America, the
land of immigrants from so many cultures and religions, anti-semitism was
present. When his mother worries about Samuel’s friends, Morris assures her
that the boys are good for Samuel:
“…there’s nothing wrong with those boys. They’re good kids
and they treat him like one of their own. They don’t hold it against him that
he’s a Jew. They don’t look up to him or down at him, just across, and that’s
what I want for Samuel.” p. 34
As you watch the adventures that Samuel and his friends have
and how they treat each other, you can judge whether or not Morris was right.
You can read Canaan
on many different levels: a sociological study of mid-twentieth century rural
America, a psychological profile of a man whose relationship challenges in
adulthood have their roots in his childhood, a rip-roaring saga of the everyday
doings of young boys in the days when after the work was done, you could get
lost all day in the woods and never see an adult.
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