The Cover of the book by Sandra Sanchez from Floricanto Press. http://www.floricantopress.com/news.htm
Like a tapestry woven over centuries of history, The Secret of a Long Journey (Floricanto Press 2012) by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez weaves in and out of the old world and the new, covering and converging stories from sixteenth century Flanders, the vast expanses of New Spain in North America, all the way to the United States of the twentieth century. The traditions of native Americans, the Catholic Church, and Kabalistic Jewry, practicing their religion under cover for fear of persecution, take on fluctuating and intersecting forms, and the characters from one generation to the next spread before us in familiar repeating patterns from birth to courtship to conception to birth again and from there to death, like beads arranged in a rosary, or in the adornments of an indian maiden.
This is not a novel in terms of traditional expectations; there is no clear cut plot whose suspense builds up to a climax, nor is there character development, for each person wanders onto the stage, goes through the motions of leading a life, and then departs into the next world, leaving behind another person to take his or her place and do pretty much the same. The genre is magical realism. The language is beautiful and enticing, and if you read it out loud to a child as a bedtime story, it does not matter so much where you begin reading and where you stop, the flow of the narrative will work its magic just the same.
The modern day episodes, concerning civil rights attorney Lois Gold, who battles on behalf of the disenfranchised in Colorado, have a grittier texture and the feel of reality, but the stories of the earlier centuries are lyrical and often read like a fairy tale, with intercession from the natural world, where animals and plants and the wind and the rain can be as powerful and as nurturing as any human.
In the weaving in and out of one tradition and another, the author shows how very much the same all these diverse myths and deities really are, and though assimilation occurs readily in the absence of persecution, the characters seemingly revel in persecution when it occurs, perhaps subconsciously longing to preserve their lost cultural heritage.
In a telling scene in one of the more realistic moments in the book, Russell Means, a native American activist,who is represented by Lois Gold for pouring fake blood on a Statue of Columbus as an act of protest against the state sanctioned holiday of Columbus Day, asks his attorney whether she has heard that Christopher Columbus was in fact a Marrano, a Jew who converted to avoid persecution, but who still practiced his religion in secret. Lois Gold replies that yes, she did know that. Then Means tells Gold that he admires the Jews, because they were able to preserve their culture for so long, and his own people were not very good at that. She replies that it goes back and forth, and that it’s only when the traditions are repressed by a government that the young people will fight to keep them alive. (Sanchez, The Secret of a Long Journey, p.110). Neither Means nor Gold follow this argument to its logical conclusion: that minorities need persecution to maintain their identity, because otherwise they disappear into the melting pot.
However, by and large, The Secret of a Long Journey is not an ideologically charged book. While it is written from a liberal perspective, it is more of a story about people battling the tides in the sea of time, making their journey from birth to death and stopping along the way to enjoy a little pleasure in the midst of all the sorrow. If you think you would like to read this book, please follow the link to Floricanto Press.
