Finesilver's Gold

Finesilver's Gold is a Jewish adventure like no other, It begins in 1894, when Jacob Finesilver, age 19, escapes conscription into the Czar's army by walking from his shtetl, Khotin, in the Ukraine to the Yukon. News of the Klondike goldrush has reached into the Ukraine, and has inflamed Jacob s imagination, as it did thousands of others from the United States and Canada. Finesilver's plan is to cross the frozen Bering Sea during the winter, when he can walk across it. He almost freezes to death, but is rescued by an Inuit Eskimo whose medicinal knowledge not only saves Jacob s life, but his gangrenous leg. A year later, Jacob sends for a bride from Khotin. Seventeen year old Malka, restless with the constraints of shtetl life, accepts his proposal and makes a similarly perilous journey, this time by a stomach-churning steerage ship to Baltimore, by train to Canada, and by foot, accompanied by the Indian guide, Andrew Red Sky, across the notorious Chilkoot Pass, braving rapids and waterfalls, escaping avalanches, all the while carrying the bridal gown she had sewn for herself in Khotin. Using Malka's diaries, the author vividly recaptures the life and people of the Yukon at the end of the 19th century, the hustle and bustle of Dawson City, the exciting feeling of the new democratic spirit growing under the life-and-death circumstances of survival, and the struggle of a young Jewish couple to maintain their religion--and their marriage--when bodily survival was difficult enough. Finesilver's Gold is not only an adventure story, but a great love story. In the end Jacob finds his gold---but what it is is the secret of his life.