According to the afterword, Chabon’s working title for Gentlemen of the Road was Jews with Swords. But as he himself admits, that brings up images of “Woody Allen backing towards the nearest exit behind a barrage of wisecracks and a wavering rapier”: funny, but in a puny way.
The Jews in the book are as far from Woody Allen as you can get: two mercenaries / con men in the 950s AD, wandering around somewhere in the Caucasus area. Zelikman is a pale, fair-haired, skinny Jew from the Frankish kingdom; Amram is a burly Ethiopian who likes to think of himself as a Jew. Neither matches the contemporary stereotype, which is exactly Chabon’s purpose.
Most of the action takes place in Khazaria, a Turkic nation that for some reason adopted Judaism as its state religion. I’d never heard of Khazaria before and at first I was convinced that it was a fiction but turns out that there really was an empire like that.
Due to money troubles (which seems to be the normal state of affairs for them) Zelikman and Amram find themselves tasked with delivering a young man safely to his grandfather’s home. The assignation spirals out of hand, and soon the pair are helping stage a revolution.
It’s Dumas with a modern, self-conscious angle. Inevitably there’s fighting and warfare, but nevertheless the adventures in the book have melancholy and fatalistic overtones. Nothing is black and white; the good guys cause as much bloodshed as the bad ones, and their reasons for acting are not more righteous.
The writing is wordy and lush, with long sentences flowing through phrase after twisting phrase. It won’t appeal to all tastes but in this setting it worked well for me.
The book as a whole was pleasant and enjoyable, but too slim, and, ultimately, forgettable. It did make me want to re-read Dumas and to read more of Chabon’s work, though.
Whenever I think of Jews with Swords I cannot help thinking about Jews with Horns. And whenever I think of Dumas, I cannot help thinking about The Shawshank Redemption.
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