An Undisturbed Peace by Mary Glickman – 472 pages
Book Blurb:
Abrahan Bento Sassaporta Naggar has traveled to America from the filthy, Jew-hating streets of East London in search of a better life. But Abe’s visions of a privileged apprenticeship in the Sassaporta Brothers’ empire based in Savannah, Georgia, are soon replaced with the grim reality of indentured servitude in his uncle Isadore’s camp town near Greensborough, North Carolina. Some 50 miles west, a woman named Dark Water of the Mountains leads a life of irreverent solitude. The daughter of a powerful Cherokee chief, it has been nearly 20 years since she renounced her family’s plans for her to marry a wealthy white man. Far away in Georgia, a black slave named Jacob has resigned himself to a life of loss and injustice in a city of refuge for criminals.
A trio of outsiders linked by unrequited and rekindled love, Abe, Dark Water, and Jacob find themselves surrounded by the escalating horrors of President Jackson’s Indian Removal Act.
My Review: 4 stars
An Undisturbed Peace was such a satisfying and engrossing read. It was chockfull of insight into the life and times during the treacherous Trail of Tears, a scar in US history. Told through an interwoven story of a Jewish European settler, a highly regarded Cherokee Indian woman, and a black slave.
I knew the very basics of the Trail of Tears but not the detailed duplicity and deep sorrow of the situation. I had no idea that the Cherokees were slave owners and ran farms, as did many of their white counterparts, before their land was taken from them.
Glickman does an excellent job of developing these three characters, especially Abe, so that the reader is aching for their successful settlement and overall peace.
With Historical Fiction being my favorite genre, this was a welcome break into a different time period that I haven’t read much about.
I highly recommend this one!
Quotes I liked:
Life is brutal in the calmest of times. In war, more so. But when you think on it, really not so much.”
-“How good work is for a man. Without it, heartsickness would kill us all.”
-“My tears were like acid. They burned my skin and made me blind.”
-“The heart’s will to live can die but the body ever fights to survive.”
-“One blanket can keep two dry in a pleasing rain, but not in a torrent.”
-“That is the way of man. To seek distraction in the petty and evade the significant.”
-“They know at the sight of me that I will come and harangue them with the vilest words because words, you know, are the only weapon I have left.”
-“Conquerors expelled us from our land and we became wanderers. We are citizens wherever we rest, until our overlords decide we are not wanted anymore.”
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