“Whatever happened on the battlefields of Europe had turned him into a monster who made a name for himself back home,” Jason Diamond writes of a minor character, nicknamed the Golem of Maxwell Street, in his debut novel. Kaplan’s Plot is a tale of merciless Jewish gangsters in Chicago and the legacy of their violence on their descendants. Violence directed at Jews in the old country is meant to account for Diamond’s characters’ cruelty, and Chicago’s famously corrupt police force leaves vulnerable immigrant groups to protect themselves through what might nicely be called extralegal means. But exonerating gangsters of any religion is troubling, and Elijah Mendes, the protagonist of the present-day action of the book has a clear-eyed that his grandfather Yitzhak “Yitz” Kaplan — whose rise from Odessa urchin to Chicago mob boss propels the book’s historical narrative — was, quite simply, a “bad guy.”
Yitz was involved in a bewildering array of heists, deals, revenge killings, and strategic assassinations — though the “plot” in the title refers to a hidden, overgrown cemetery in the center of Chicago that Eve Kaplan, a dying poet in the present-day sections of the book, has inherited and doesn’t want to talk about. This leads Elijah, her son, to the Greater Chicagoland Hebrew Benevolent Society, a mysterious group of aging Orthodox people occupying a little building between a gym and a condominium tower. They in turn lead Elijah to the truth about his grandfather Yitzhak.
As a boy, Yitzhak hides with his brother Solomon in their Odessa home during a pogrom, the commotion overhead causing blood to trickle through the floorboards. When the house has quieted down, the boys hoist themselves up to find their mother rolling her eyes at Yitzhak’s urine-soaked pants. You’d think she’d give a boy a break — after all, she’s standing over the body of a man and “[t]here was a knife straight through his dead man’s skull.” Happily, Diamond plays this gruesome scene for laughs. While Yitzhak’s mother is perfectly capable of driving a knife through human bone, she needs her child’s assistance to pull it out. Yitzhak hesitates, which subjects him to his mother’s withering scorn:
“You want the knife?” Yitzhak said.
“Yes. The knife,” Mother said.
“The one in his head?”
“Are you a fool? Yes. The one in his head.”
“Pull it out?”
“Yitzhak, there’s no time for this. That’s my best knife.”
“Mama, I don’t think it’s kosher anymore,” Yitzhak said.
Yitzhak does the deed, and in the new world, his newfound cold-bloodedness allows him to rise in the ranks of the Jewish mafia. But before the boy’s escape to America, his mother had told him: “My Yitzalah. It’s not your little brother I’m worried about. You’re fragile as an egg yolk.” Yitzhak is in no way fragile, but he certainly is troubled as a mob boss in America, seemingly unable to feel anything at all except for an enduring love for his brother, Solomon — a sensitive soul who nonetheless follows his shochet father’s footsteps and isn’t squeamish with a knife.
The humor of the primal scene in the Old Country tempers its shocking violence, and Diamond maintains this heightened tone when describing even the most brutal killings. The present-day action is more realistic, with domestic scenes between Elijah and his mother, Eve, who has never been able to connect with her untrusting son. Diamond makes this lack of connection literal — on the first page of the book, baby Elijah swats away Eve’s nipple. Now he’s a has-been tech executive in his thirties, living in his childhood home and destroying himself with self-reproach and various chemicals. Eve’s view of her murderer father omits the murder part; she sees him mainly as a survivor of America.
Will Elijah and Eve’s joint sleuthing into the brutal family past help mother and son find some kind of peace with their pasts and with each other? This is the question that drives the present-day narrative. Intergenerational trauma is a clear theme in Kaplan’s Plot, but the true interest of this novel is the world of Jewish gangland. Kaplan shows that while violence may be intended to right a wrong, it only repeats the injury, producing nothing but suffering — unless you can escape its cycle, as Eve and Elijah try valiantly to do.
Jason K. Friedman is the author of the story collection Fire Year, which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and the Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Award. His article on the Solomon Cohen family, published in Moment magazine, won an American Jewish Press Association Award. He lives in San Francisco, with his husband, filmmaker Jeffrey Friedman.
