Michelle Cameron's Babylon illuminates life during the Jewish exile in ancient Babylon

Babylon is engrossing from start to finish. Michelle Cameron’s novels illustrate the lives of the Jewish people (especially women) at times and places rarely explored in fiction. I’ve enjoyed The Fruit of Her Hands (13th-century Europe) and Beyond the Ghetto Gates (Napoleonic-era Italy), and this one is even better.

The story begins in 586 BCE, as Chaldean soldiers in the army of Nebuchadnezzar, Babylon’s mighty ruler, overtake the prosperous farm outside Jerusalem where a young woman named Sarah lives with her parents, brother, and cousin. After her other relatives are killed, Sarah and her cousin Reuven are forcibly marched, along with numerous other captives, on the lengthy journey to Babylon. Some of the enslaved Judeans are chosen to be servants at the royal palace; others are settled on farms, with orders to grow specific crops. The characters undergo difficult ordeals, presented unflinchingly yet with great compassion. Sarah always yearns for the day she’ll see her farm again and keeps faith that the Judeans will be allowed to return. However, while they preserve their customs and faith in this very foreign land, there’s no denying the allure of the dazzling riches at court.

Babylon spans over eighty years and three generations, with genealogical charts in the opening pages for the novel’s three principal families: Sarah and her lineage, the Babylonian royals, and the people who take up residence in the farm Sarah was forced to abandon. While I love that the charts exist, I didn’t consult them until I was done, since I didn’t want to know in advance which relationships would be forming. This is an epic novel, and Cameron has mastered the art of moving through a wide swath of time without choppiness and without losing readers’ emotional connection to the characters. And the characters themselves are a colorful and interesting bunch, including vain and power-hungry princesses, farmers, talented musicians, Biblical prophets, and a dedicated scribe who chronicles happenings for posterity.

Individual Judeans and the people as a whole work through questions relating to assimilation – intermarriage, adoption of a new land’s customs and religious rituals, and more – but don’t find simple answers. It’s altogether an immersive tale, told with an underlying sense of warmth, about resilience during adversity, family, faith, and how people instill the meaning of home in their daily lives even while far away.

Babylon was published last year by Wicked Son/Post Hill Press; I read it from a personal copy.