One of the greatest pleasures of working for Acre Books comes from reading the hundreds of submissions we receive, and the electric moment of discovering a manuscript so assured in its style and vision that it feels totally original. As someone who has spent some time in the classroom teaching students the techniques of historical fiction, I found myself marveling at several moments during my first read-through of Moshe Marvit’s debut novel, Nothing Vast, a complex, decades-spanning tale that follows several interconnected families across the globe as they are changed, erased, and reshaped by the creation of the state of Israel. The depth of detail throughout is staggering, at times almost scholarly. Early chapters mirror each other, opening with dates, names, places, and actions, suggesting an archivist’s work. The novel’s complex braided arrangement of storylines exemplifies the challenge of navigating incomplete histories: if the records, including our own family stories, are full of gaps—as much a testament to what has been lost, excluded, or overlooked as they are to what has been passed down and commonly altered—then the closest we can come to the truth is to sift through the competing, often contradictory, threads in order to try and connect them ourselves.

Within this intricate layering of perspectives, Marvit artfully imagines the small, sometimes silent moments of loss and revelation that profoundly alter his characters as much as any major historical events. In doing so, he exposes the ways in which everyday people—those who, as Coco Picard writes in her recent illustrated interview in Chicago Review of Books,

… [don’t] appear in history books, but who nevertheless participate in [history’s] devastating occasion[s]”—use stories and myth-making to “order their lives so as to never confront [their trauma and memories].”

One such character is Massouda, a Moroccan Zionist and young mother who dreams of relocating her family to Palestine. In this early chapter titled Nissim, set during a trip to the Casablanca beach in the spring of 1942, we witness the shocking moment that Massouda discovers her youngest son has been swept away by the waves while she was daydreaming. Her quiet reaction is haunting, unexpected, and utterly believable: overwhelmed by shock, she gathers her remaining children and leaves the beach, consoles herself with a fantasy even as her oldest daughter, Simi, twists in her grip and urges her to stay and look for Nissim:

         Massouda thought back to a childhood story about a girl who was visited by a maggid in a dream and told that the hakham’s newborn son would be her future. Frustrated by having to wait for the baby to grow before she could start a family, the girl placed the infant inside a box, put his amulet around his neck, and threw him into the sea. This sea. Casablanca’s sea. In Tangier, a different hakham bought a fish at market and found the boy alive inside. A boy so beautiful, the goats would not graze if they saw him. After being raised to bar mitzvah by the Tangier hakham, the boy found his way home by grasping the amulet and following its fortunes.

 

‘Was he wearing his amulet?’ Massouda asked Simi and the other children.

Moving from the scale of personal trauma to cultural trauma and its aftermaths, Nothing Vast gradually reveals what comes of these personal histories and ghost stories, and the eventual toll of the myths we tell ourselves