Novel on Ethiopian Jews commendably avoids sentimentality

I finished Claire Frieze’s Memories of Things to Come: The Exodus of the Ethiopian Jews last week, and the book has not left me. It is not the kind of novel that lets you close the covers and return, undisturbed, to the rest of the evening.

Frieze follows a young man named Ami who escapes Ethiopia in 1977, builds a new life in Israel, and then returns in 1984 to bring his family and others out. Along the way the novel gives us both the struggle of these Jews inside Ethiopia and the quieter, longer struggle of resettlement as an African “stranger” in a new and different land. That tension is already present in the names themselves. The Ethiopian Jews call themselves Beta Israel—“House of Israel.” Others have long called them Falasha—“stranger.” Frieze keeps both names alive, and the difference between them is never merely linguistic. It marks the distance between how a people understands itself and how others receive it, a distance the novel refuses to close too quickly.

Ami’s first emigration is difficult, but he is young. He sees the possibility of a brighter future even while he recognizes that for many others the road into Israeli society will be harder still. When he goes back in 1984, the novel does not spare us. The journey from the villages around Gondar to the Sudanese border, and then the months in the refugee camp, are brutal. People die of starvation, dehydration, exposure, and assault. An estimated 4,000 Beta Israel perished on that route.

Operation Moses eventually airlifts roughly 8,000 people to Israel, yet the novel refuses to treat the airlift as the story’s end. Arrival is only the beginning of another set of questions: who belongs, who is still regarded as a stranger, and what it costs to keep faith with those who have not yet come.

Frieze, the pen name of Diane Shubinsky, a Manchester-born scholar who taught for many years at the University of Haifa, does not write a panorama of policy. She stays with one carefully observed life and with the letters that travel between those who have already reached Israel and those who are still waiting. The letters are the real spine of the book. Through them we feel the slow erosion of hope, the practical arrangements for money and information, and the knowledge that any delay can mean another death.

They are written in more than one register—some meant for officials, others meant only for the family that remains behind. A person who must write both kinds of letters is already living in two times at once. The historical appendix that closes the volume supplies the larger frame—the possible origins of the Beta Israel, the later waves of immigration, the sequence of events that produced the airlifts—but the novel itself declines to do the work of the appendix. It keeps us inside the interval between the decision to leave and the moment of arrival, and it asks what it cost to live inside that interval.

The early chapters capture the sacred weight of ancestral place without sentimentality. As the village elders prepare to abandon their stone homes and graves, departure is rendered not as a clean break but as an amputation of identity and continuity. The title itself is a deliberate temporal paradox. For the Beta Israel, Jerusalem was not a geopolitical city of asphalt and high-rises; it was an ancient, luminous prophecy remembered across millennia. In Frieze’s telling, the future was remembered long before it was ever seen.

The middle movements of the novel trace the devastating trek across the borderlands into eastern Sudan. Frieze resists the temptation to sanitize these chapters. Her prose tightens into stark sensory realism: the heat that turns rock into skillet, the fear of wandering hyenas and armed militias, the unbearable ethical choices forced upon parents with starving infants. Moving solely under the cover of night exacts a psychological toll that the novel renders without rhetorical inflation. Silence becomes a currency spent until throats crack, and every cry risks drawing the headlights of border patrols.

When the survivors reach the overcrowded camps at Gedaref and Tawawa, the promised deliverance reveals itself as a bureaucratic purgatory. The refugees must disguise their Jewish identity, living under constant terror of detection while waiting for clandestine contacts to arrange evacuation. Ami’s youthful idealism gives way to a hardened, protective vigilance. Through his encounters with the elder kesoch, who strive to maintain ritual purity and community dignity in the mud, the novel meditates on the fragility of human institutions when stripped of geographic stability. The quiet heroism of everyday survival—women preserving ritual objects, men burying their dead according to ancestral custom, youth acting as couriers under penalty of execution—emerges without exaggeration.

The eventual airlift is handled with restraint. There is no Hollywood crescendo. Stepping onto Israeli soil does not mark the conclusion of the crisis; it initiates an entirely new chapter of cultural transition, alienation, and identity friction. The Beta Israel arrived in an Israel that was intensely secularized, bureaucratic, and Eurocentric. They met genuine humanitarian warmth, but also patronizing paternalism and theological suspicion. Religious authorities questioned the halakhic validity of their ancient lineage, demanding symbolic conversion rituals that felt deeply insulting to a community that had bled to preserve its covenant for thousands of years.

Ami’s father, an elder who carried the spiritual memory of his village in his posture, finds himself rendered mute in an absorption center, his authority dissolved amid the hum of appliances and the condescension of young social workers who treat him as a child who has not yet learned to read the morning clock. The novel engages the systemic misunderstandings of the absorption era: clerical condescension, housing segregation in peripheral development towns, and the deep generational divide that opened between parents who clung to Amharic and Ge’ez traditions and children who rapidly embraced Hebrew, Western clothing, and military duty.

The novel shines brightest in its refusal to slip into melodrama. Historical fiction that addresses mass suffering often succumbs to cheap sentimentalism or exploitative misery. Frieze avoids both traps through rigorous narrative discipline. Her characters have sharp edges; they bicker, show petty rivalries under stress, make catastrophic errors of judgment, and occasionally lose faith. This psychological roundness makes their endurance more poignant. At times, restraint costs something. At certain junctions—particularly during Ami’s interactions with Israeli officials—the dialogue can feel weighted by historical scene-setting. Characters occasionally speak in summaries designed more to educate the modern reader than to express authentic interiority.

And the creative tension remains in an outsider author interpreting the profound interior of the Beta Israel experience. While Frieze’s academic rigor and empathetic depth are beyond dispute, certain nuances of indigenous Amharic linguistic idiom and interior liturgical prayer feel slightly filtered through an Anglo-European literary sensibility. Nevertheless, she navigates this landscape with consummate humility. She does not co-opt the voice of the Ethiopian Jewish community; she builds an imaginative bridge.

The book is fiction, yet it sends the reader outward. After I closed it I found myself wanting to know more about this part of our Jewish family history—the villages around Gondar, the long walk to Sudan, the camps at Gedaref and Tawawa, the absorption centers in Israel, the difference between being called Beta Israel and being called Falasha. Frieze does not resolve those questions into a single narrative of triumph. She leaves them open, which is why the book keeps working on you after you finish it.

Memories of Things to Come is not a nostalgic phrase. It names the peculiar temporality of the people who left. They carried with them a memory of a place they would not see again and a set of expectations about a place they had not yet reached. The novel does not resolve that double orientation into a single narrative of arrival. It keeps both orientations active. Ami remembers the village; he also remembers the camp; he also remembers the moment in Israel when he understood that the people he had left behind were still waiting.

The book’s achievement is to make that layered memory legible without reducing it to a lesson. It restores the interval between the decision to leave and the moment of arrival, and it asks what it cost to live inside that interval. The cost is not abstract. It is measured in letters that go unanswered, in children who arrive without their parents, and in the knowledge, decades later, that the rescue that saved so many also left so many behind. Frieze has written a novel that treats that knowledge as part of the story rather than as an inconvenience to it. That is a rarer achievement than the airlift itself, and it is why the book is a must-read.

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Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel is spiritual leader of Temple Beth Shalom in Chula Vista, California.