I've always been a big fan of stories about the American Revolution. I know all the lyrics to 1776. I watched Liberty's Kids religiously when it was on PBS (the cartoon with Walter Cronkite as Benjamin Franklin. Anyone else remember that? No? Moving on). I wish I had the money to see Hamilton. So when Rose Lerner offered me an Advance Reader's Copy of Hamilton's Battalion, a collection of three novellas about soldiers who may have served under Alexander Hamilton at the Battle of Yorktown, I leaped at the opportunity to read it. (Full disclosure: this is also an opportunity to actually get people to read my blog.)
Lerner's story, Promised Land, is the first story in the book. It's about a Jewish woman named Rachel who leaves the man she'd married for financial stability and joins Washington's army disguised as a man. It's also about me.
I have never felt so represented in a book before. It wasn't always a good feeling: Rachel and I are under a lot of similar pressures and stresses, and she has a clear sense of purpose and a coherent plan for the rest of her life that I don't feel like I will ever have. But for once, I feel like somebody in a book really understands what it's like to be me.
Like me, Rachel struggles to find a balance between maintaining her Jewish identity and making her own way in life. (If you're interested in my life story, you can read it in my post from last winter about my complicated relationship with Christmas.) Like me, her first answer is to walk away from what she sees as arbitrarily harsh traditional rules so she can fit in in her new life: she eats bacon with her comrades in arms, she works on Shabbat, and while there are other Jews in the battalion, they're all equally assimilated into the group's Protestant-normative culture. Like me, she sees herself as an ambassador of her identity, feeling the need to prove that women and Jews can do anything Christian white guys can. And like me (thinking of the 2016 presidential election here), she gets a dramatic wakeup call in the form of her frustrating husband Nathan, who believes her to be dead, showing up in her camp as a double agent and forcing her to finally figure out what it means to be Jewish in America well enough to explain it to him.
Nathan, for what it's worth, reminds me for better and for worse of my own (goyish) boyfriend, so I feel especially good about his character growth. Rachel is not who he expected her to be, and he learns not only to accept that, but to respect and support her in her postwar career plans, and he gains the self-awareness to recognize and admit when he's a source of stress for Rachel. It's also worth noting that I was actually drawn to this story in the first place by a blurb describing Nathan's (probably stereotypically Ashkenazi) nose as handsome, which is a rare pleasure because that's my nose too.
The minor characters also generally acquit themselves well. The portrayal of Hamilton himself reminds me of both his appearance in Liberty's Kids and the first act of Hamilton. Rachel's squadmates are also endearing in a way that reminds me of that other story where a woman disguised as a man becomes a soldier. And though the group is small, they feel much more diverse than the mostly-Anglo cast of Liberty's Kids. They are Italian, Portuguese, black, Jewish, gay, and they all know not to be hateful to each other, though a couple of them are jerks to Nathan while he's a prisoner, and others try to out Rachel as a woman when they think they have evidence. They're not as good as they could be at accepting people for what they are, but they do acknowledge that Jews, black people, and soldiers' wives all have a role to play in making America happen, and it makes Rachel hopeful that she can make her mark on the world and make the United States a good place to be a Jew.
The future Rachel imagined has not come to pass. Americans routinely forget the role that Jews (and women and black people and queer people and every other marginalized group) have played in making America happen, to the detriment of everyone. But America has not stopped happening yet (G-d forbid), and as the ancient sage Rabbi Tarfon once said, “You are not expected to finish the work, but neither are you free to avoid it.” Promised Land does good work.
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