The Airship: Incantations

The Airship is the hypnotic fictional biography of Nathan Cohen, who is deported from the United States in 1912 under the Alien Act and who spends the first years of World War I on the passenger ship Vasari, shuttled between the United States and Argentina. Newspapers call him "The Wandering Jew" and "The Man Without a Country," speculating he will spend the rest of his life at sea.

The Airship is the hypnotic fictional biography of Nathan Cohen, who emigrates from Bauska, in the Russian Pale of Settlement, to Las Pampas, Argentina, and finally to the United States, where he suffers a breakdown and is deported under the Alien Act in 1912, just before the outbreak of WWI. Newspapers call him "The Wandering Jew" and "The Man Without a Country," speculating he will spend the rest of his life at sea.

Adam Tipps Weinstein provides a wise, rich, nuanced, and mischievous account of Cohen's emigration from Bauska, in the Russian Pale of Settlement, to Las Pampas, Argentina, from one tragedy (the Jewish diaspora) to another (the Shoah of the conquest of the Americas). The Airship is finally Cohen's wish for a new line of flight, which he realizes when he launches his beloved Laika, aboard a scavenged hot-air balloon.

From one tragedy (the Jewish diaspora) to another (the Shoah of the conquest of the Americas), Adam Tipps Weinstein provides a wise, rich, nuanced, and mischievous retelling of Cohen's travels, and his wish for a new line of flight, which he realizes when he launches his beloved Laika, aboard a scavenged hot-air balloon.

Told through a series of incantations--spells, songs, folk tales, ghosts, charms--this entrancing book traces Cohen's journey across time and a great expanse of geography. The concepts of home and homeland are stretched until they break. Is there such a thing as home? How do we know when we have arrived? The Airship evokes these paradoxes of location, nationality, faith, belonging, and identity in a bordered and borderless world.