From Gently Read Literature Spring 2014
Sometimes in the process of getting engrossed in a truly mesmerizing book, you can’t help but take 
a sly glance at the author’s photo—even though you’re not supposed to—and wonder if perhaps she’s really writing this riveting tale about herself in spite of the fact that it says “novel” on the jacket cover. Such is not the case with Jen Michalski’s spellbinding book, The Tide King, winner of Black Lawrence Press‘s 2012 Big Moose Prize. No way can the book be about that woman inside the back cover, unless she is capable of shrinking and enlarging her body, time travel, and fighting in World War II. Besides that, there’s the utter magic that Michalski weaves through these pages. Sure, we want to believe there is a little of that in all of our lives. We don’t like to think of ourselves as adhering strictly to what is visible. But the type of magic in this book truly is extraordinary.
One can’t help invoking Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his earthy little villages being visited upon by flamboyant angels with crooked wings falling to the earth and how real-life folks would react to such an abnormality. Or perhaps Luis Urrea, who has said when people call his book magical realism that it really isn’t, for the miracles he writes about in his fiction did happen and are documented. Michalski’s own brand of the paradoxical phrase, “magical realism,” marks the book as important in the in the history of this genre. The Tide King is a combination of extremely well-researched history of World War II, the Holocaust, gypsies during this time period, and a strange herb called burnette saxifrage, which causes magic. Inhabitants of Poland once thought this herb ensured that one would never die. It is still used to heal wounds and injuries, to help cows produce more milk, for indigestion, to get rid of freckles, as a diuretic, to cure spoiled wine, for asthma and dropsy, toothaches, and to break down mucus. Who’s to say what its capabilities are?
The Tide King opens in 1976 with a mysterious threesome getting into a cab in Kaliningrad, Russia, to be driven to Reszel, Poland. The cabbie is baffled by the man and woman, seemingly in their twenties, and an eight- or nine-year old girl, all of whom have no luggage for this two-hour drive. “The woman seemed too young to be a mother, and the man seemed too old, somehow, to be a young man. . . . Only the young girl, perhaps adopted, spoke Polish, a bit of Russian, both with a strange dialect.” This girl, wiser than her years, seems to have a history with Reszel which, given her age, isn’t possible. The cab driver asks her in Polish whether she’s okay and wants to know, “Who are these people?” In English, she asks the woman whether she should tell him “. . . we are the gods who live in hell?” This spectacular scene stays with the reader all the way through the book and informs the ending.
Jump to 1942 and Baltimore and a young man going off to war. His mother can’t bear to accompany him to the train station because it would break her heart to see him leave. She hands him an old envelope with a moldy-looking object inside:
“‘Burnette saxifrage,’ she tells him. She put the crumbly mound in his palm. ‘Most powerful herb. I save it until now. . . . You take it when you are about to die. You will live.'” This young man, Stanley Polensky, “a queer little private,” carries a copy of Tom Swift and His Planet Stone tucked into his pants once he gets to boot camp in Fort Benning. Another private calls him “a nancy boy,” and says, “Polensky, throw that thing away. . . . No wonder you don’t get any.”
“‘At least I can read,’ Polensky says.”
Ironically, Stanley soon becomes buddies with the private mentioned above, Calvin Johnson, a man who is Stanley’s complete opposite. From Ohio, Johnson, a farm boy, is annoyed at first by this short little guy, but comes to see him as the younger brother he never had and somehow manages to laugh at Stanley and take up for him as well. Johnson is 6’5″ and explains to Stanley that he “had lettered in high school before . . . a gimpy ankle kept him from getting a scholarship to college.” While they develop a bond and trudge first across North Africa together and then through German-occupied France—soldiers around them getting picked “off like fucking lemmings,” even together they are faced with the alienation of being on foreign soil, away from family, and not knowing whether they will survive. It is no wonder that in the heat of battle with men dying left and right and Johnson’s leg falling off so there’s nothing he can do but die, that it is into Johnson’s mouth Stanley stuffs the powerful herb. What follows is bizarre.
As the reader, you’re already staying up too late with this addicting book. Then Michalski switches to a completely different time and scenario, which irritates you not just a little because you don’t want the story she’s already entranced you with to stop. And herein lies my only criticism of the book that from this point on one can at times become somewhat lost in the time jumps, especially since we’re leaping forward and backward, sometimes with the same characters at different points in their lives, and the two main tales occur in very different time periods. Even with the years clearly labeled, one occasionally has to go back and reread to take stock of what the time period and place are.
The problem of shifting to a whole new story is soon rectified as Michalski quickly engages you in an equally bewitching thread in the tale. It soon becomes apparent that while the characters at first seem to have nothing to do with each other, they are infinitely connected. The theme of loneliness and alienation glue them together as well.
Now it’s 1800s in Reszel, Poland, and we come across an odd little girl named Ela. Her mother is the town herbalist, though some accuse her of being a witch. Because her tinctures of herbs offer the town its only real medicine, while she isn’t exactly embraced, she isn’t bothered by the townspeople either, and they live in a shack outside of town. The Nazis are very different regarding solutions for people who bother them. Early in the book, Ela’s mother dies, leaving the girl utterly abandoned. Her house is burned down and the town now ostracizes her because of the Germans. Ela meets a series of gypsies travelling through the nearby forest. The parents worry about their children playing with the daughter of a witch, but eventually see that she is kind-hearted. However, witches and gypsies and Nazis and the Holocaust are not a good blend. We are duly horrified by the soldiers hunting these outcasts. Fortunately, Michalski doesn’t stop and spell out history but expects her reader to be as knowledgeable as she is.
What’s truly brilliant is how Michalski does bring these gripping tales together. Either a lot of forethought went into braiding these so exactly, or she really is magical. The characterization is impeccable—you’ll be sorry when the story ends and you have to say goodbye to these people.
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