Based in part on his own family history, Goldman’s novel follows the Kaners, a Jewish family in St. Paul, Minnesota, former owners of a liquor store shuttered in 1920 with the passage of the 18th Amendment. When they fear the mob will order a hit on the family’s eldest son, Willie, because of his involvement in a competing bootlegging operation, parents Red and Emma, sister Rose and uncle Lewis, an actor and playwright, stage an elaborate fake execution. That event, which unfolds in the novel’s opening pages, launches a story that exposes crime and the casual official corruption that permits it in the Minnesota capital. The story shifts intermittently to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where Rose lives, and where Willie meets Pearl, a young Black woman later forced to flee after the speakeasy owner who had given her refuge—one of Willie’s customers—is gunned down by the mob. Through her character, and those of Emma and Rose, Goldman illuminates the lives of women in this era and explores the stirrings of an incipient feminism. Without sacrificing the momentum of his story, he touches on other aspects of American life a century ago: its open racial, religious, and ethnic bigotry; the curious alliance between suffragists and the Ku Klux Klan that helped secure Prohibition’s approval; and above all, how banning alcohol, for all its moral pretensions, fostered an environment that drove otherwise law-abiding citizens to concoct elaborate schemes to evade the law’s impact. A prime example was the profusion of “rabbis” like Red’s brother Isaac who provided cover for the sale of wine. Apart from an unnecessary subplot involving Mabel, a girl forced into prostitution who becomes the subject of Rose’s rescue effort, the novel’s plot is well paced and features several romantic entanglements, with some satisfying twists packed into its concluding pages. All of this combines to build a sturdy work of historical fiction.
