“In the olden times, in the old country of Latvia, a girl walks out of the city into the forest to gather mushrooms in a basket, like a child in a fairytale.” So begins Linda Grant’s absorbing ninth novel, The Story of the Forest. The year is 1913, the mushroom-gathering girl 14-year-old Mina Mendel, daughter of a prosperous Jewish flour merchant in Riga, who happens while walking to stumble upon a clandestine meeting of Bolshevik boys. They are singing. One of them asks her to dance. Exultant, a little afraid, Mina “felt something dislodge in her, the mechanism that was winding her down like a cheap clock to early marriage and a replica of her mother’s pale floury form”. Change is duly set in motion. When Mina summons the courage to return to the forest, her scheming younger brother, Itzik, follows and witnesses her first, chaste kiss. Gleefully, he reports the news back to their eldest brother, Jossel. Afraid that his father will hear of it and hustle the spirited Mina into a respectably miserable marriage, anxious himself to escape the stifling predictabilities of his father’s business, Jossel suggests that they emigrate to America.
Folk tales, as Grant points out, begin with a journey. This particular journey takes Mina and Jossel as far as England, where first lack of funds and then the outbreak of war prevent the onward crossing to New York. Instead, they settle in Liverpool. Left behind in Riga, their parents and three siblings must endure in their different ways the agonies of “the great wound of the 20th century”, but, safe in the Jewish community of Brownlow Hill, Mina’s closest brush with the Bolshevist idealism of the boys in the forest is working in the cafeteria of a munitions factory during the “Great War”. Meanwhile, Jossel is sent to the eastern front where he, too, acquires a story that will be polished up and passed down the generations: he saves the life of a fellow soldier, a Polish Jew who later becomes Mina’s husband.
