I recently finished a wonderful novel by Judith Katz called The Escape Artist. I'd previously read and enjoyed Katz's first novel, Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound, a contemporary coming of age story. The Escape Artist is a period piece that takes inspiration from the late nineteenth century migration of Jewish people from villages in Russia and Eastern Europe to Buenas Aires and the settlement known as "Palestine on the Pampas," or Moisesville.

If you are a fan of Sarah Waters's novels, you should definitely consider picking up The Escape Artist. Like Waters's Fingersmith and Affinity, The Escape Artist involves a lesbian affair with an intricate plotline set against a colorful background of petty criminality and vice. The elements of cross-dressing, betrayal, and attentiveness to period detail and atmosphere that make Waters's novels so delectable can all be found in Katz's book.

The novel explores the metaphor of "the escape artist"--the Houdini-like figure with a gift for moving magically in and out of tight spaces. Another book that deals with Jewish culture and diaspora, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, examined this metaphor in relation to comic book superheroes and the work of the artist. In the Escape Artist, the metaphor is extended to those who are flexible and dexterous regarding gender and sexuality.

If you decide to read Katz's marvelous book, you may want to bookmark a Yiddish-English Glossary, since the novel contains many Yiddish words and phrases. I tried asking the Cute Little Red-Headed Girlfriend to translate for me, even though her Yiddish mostly consists of curses like, "Go shit in the ocean." She recognized some of the words, but the rest she looked up at the web resource mentioned above.