This incongruity of writer and work suggests, of course, that classic variant of the adventure story (found in works as diverse as Don Quixote and Romancing the Stone) in which a devoted reader or author of the stuff is granted the opportunity (or obliged) to live out an adventure “in real life.” And it is seen in this light that the association of Jews with swords, of Jews with adventure, may seem paradoxically less incongruous. In the relation of the Jews to the land of their origin, in the ever-extending, ever-thinning cord, braided from the freedom of the wanderer and the bondage of exile, that binds a Jew to his Home, we can make out the unmistakable signature of adventure. The story of the Jews centers around—one might almost say that it stars—the hazards and accidents, the misfortunes and disasters, the feats of inspiration, the travail and despair, and intermittent moments of glory and grace, that entail upon journeys from home and back again. For better and worse it has been one long adventure— a five-thousand-year Odyssey—from the moment of the true First Commandment, when God told Abraham lech lecha: Thou shalt leave home. Thou shalt get lost. Thou shalt find slander, oppression, opportunity escape, and destruction. Thou shalt, by definition, find adventure. This long, long tradition of Jewish adventure may look a bit light on the Conans or DArtagnans; our greatest heroes less obviously suited to exploits of derring-do and arms. But maybe that ill-suitedness only makes Jews all the more ripe to feature in (or to write) this kind of tale. Or maybe it is time to take a look backward at that tradition, as I have attempted to do here, and find some shadowy kingdom where a self-respecting Jewish adventurer would not be caught dead without his sword or his battle-ax.
And if you still think there's something funny in the idea of Jews with swords, look at yourself, right now: sitting in your seat on a jet airplane, let's say, in your unearthly orange polyester and neoprene shoes, listening to digital music, crawling across the sky from Charlotte to Las Vegas, and hoping to lose yourself—your home, your certainties, the borders and barriers of your life— by means of a bundle of wood pulp, sewn and glued and stained with blobs of pigment and resin. People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh.
—Michael Chabon
A NOTE ON THE KHAZARS
As evidenced by the words of Ibn Shaprut that stand as one of this story's epigraphs, the mysterious Jewish Kingdom of the Khazars has always enchanted and even haunted Jews living in the Diaspora. Even today we know little about the Khazars, a people of Turkic origin who settled in, and for a while came to dominate, the Caucasus–Black Sea region. It appears that large numbers of them converted to Judaism sometime before 900 c.e. or so, but no one is completely sure to what extent the conversion took place, or for what reasons. No one is very sure of anything about the Khazars, who left few written records. But they seem to have been a dominant force in the region for several hundred years, during which time they were visited by some of the great Arab travelers, whose accounts are our primary sources of information about Khazaria. To write Gentlemen of the Road I read everything about the Khazars that I could get my hands on, including the Travels of Ibn Battuta. Unfortunately, the extensive research undertaken by Russian archaeologists and scholars lay beyond my abilities. My chief source of information was the excellent The Jews of Khazaria, second edition, by Kevin Alan Brook. I also derived a certain sense of atmosphere, and of the historical meaning of the Khazars, from the perhaps unreliable The Thirteenth Tribe by Arthur Koestler. For arms and armor, I made happy use of five volumes of the wonderful Osprey Men-At-Arms series (numbers 85, 89, 105, 320, and 333). Readers interested in looking further into the world and time of the Khazars might also consult the relevant entries in the Encyclopedia Judaica, as well as the following websites:
http://www.khazaria.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazars
http://wwwfanaticus.org/DBA/armies/dba93.html
http://wwwgeocities.com/Eureka/Enterprises/2493/caucbord.htm
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Chabon is the author of the bestselling
The Yiddish Policemen's Union and The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay, which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the novelist
Ayelet Waldman, and their children.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Gary Gianni graduated from the Chicago Academy
of Fine Arts and began his career as an illustrator for the
Chicago Tribune and as a network television courtroom sketch
artist. He has received the Eisner and Spectrum awards
for his work, which appears in numerous books, comics,
and magazines. Gianni currently draws the syndicated
newspaper adventure strip Prince Valiant.
Gentlemen of the Road is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Michael Chabon
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Originally published in serial form in The New York Times in 2007.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Chabon, Michael.
Gentlemen of the road: a tale of adventure/Michael Chabon;
illustrated by Gary Gianni.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-49565-5
1. Azerbaijan—History—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.H15G46 2007
813′.54—dc22 2007029251
www.delreybooks.com
v3.0
Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure
(Series: # )
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