Brilliant novels set in Jewish Glasgow

A few months ago I wrote about the publication of Jewish Glasgow and to my great surprise, the post was read by more than 1,000 people (probably expat. Scottish Jews) around the world. I’m hoping this post will reach the same audience, as the work I’m about to describe deserves at least the same praise.

“David Simons has become a famous author,” declared an old friend at the dinner table during my recent visit to Glasgow.

I’m always interested in a good read – irresistible if the author is someone I know.

That evening, I powered up my Kindle and searched for J. David Simons.

For the bargain price of only $4, I downloaded The Credit Draper – and was hooked by the end of page one.

Reading Simon’s description of 11 year-old Avram Escovitz’s arrival alone in Glasgow at the turn of last century was (almost) the story of my own grandfather. Indeed the world David creates is that of Gorbals Glasgow where most of Scottish Jewry lived, worked, and eked out a sparse living as foreigners in a strange, but accepting new land. He captures the atmosphere of the times, the dreekit Scottish weather, the coarse landscapes, the WWI years, the boozing, the gambling, the Jewish/Scottish cultural divide, the harshness of existence, industrial strife, the Highland crofts, and a wee Jewish boy that dreams of playing for Celtic. All this is wound up in an enthralling, wonderfully complicated story with believable characters, plausible interactions, beautiful writing and catastrophic misunderstandings.

When I finished The Credit Draper, I sat pummelled in my seat. The end is powerful, unexpected and frightening in its underlying message.

I found the author’s web site and discovered that I’d just read the first of a trilogy. For $4 more, I acquired The Liberation of Celia Kahn, the sequel – an equally powerful work that describes the early life of Celia Kahn, Avram’s ‘step sister’. Celia is a young Jewish woman from a poor Gorbals family fighting for social justice and women’s rights while coming to terms with her own Jewish identity. Again, it is a great read, weaving delicately with the The Credit Draper – but this time, from Celia’s perspective. Much of it takes place around Thistle Street and Abbotsford Place – where my own father grew up. (Indeed, it became a little too familiar when one of the characters approached Haifa by boat. It was as if 100 years later I’d followed the character’s footsteps from Queen’s Park to Mount Carmel. When I read the chapter, it was so close to my own experience, I almost felt I should go down to the port to welcome him at the dockside!)

I sought out David’s email address and wrote to him to congratulate him on his work. He told me that the third book in the trilogy, The Land Agent, (set mainly in Palestine in the 1920s, in Haifa and on a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley), is due out this year and will be published along with the above two books in a single volume in October.

Anyone with Jewish roots in Scotland will thoroughly enjoy these books. If you want hard copies, I suggest thebookdepository.com (who don’t charge for shipping and the books get from the UK to Israel within a week). If you have a Kindle you can acquire them for just $4 – a fraction of a movie ticket – and they’re truly worth the read.

If you have your doubts, take a look at the rave reviews.

Meanwhile, David’s website says his fourth book, An Exquisite Sense of What is Beautiful, (unconnected with the above) “in January 2014, reached number one in literary fiction for Kindle Paid downloads in the UK, France and Germany.”

Trust me. If you’ve anything to do with Scottish Jewry, you can’t find a better read.

Pass it oan, wull yeh…