The Magic of Organizing?

Any Tikkun readers delighted by Harry Potter will enjoy picking up this book. If you have ever idly wished someone would conjure up a tale for kids that would impart a Potter-esque magical glow to progressive politics and Jewish culture, and maybe even New York, then take note. This book succeeds at two out of those three.

Adult sci-fi author Chris Moriarty has given us a cross between Potter and E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime. In her early 1900s New York City, Sacha, a thirteen-year-old Jewish immigrant boy, has to battle magical forces wielded by robber barons. Can his grandfather, the rabbi from the old country and an expert on everything kabbalistic, including dybbuks, help? Will his unwelcome sidekick, Lily, daughter of the über-wealthy high-society Astral family, be of any use? Why has Inspector Wolf, a mysterious NYPD Inquisitor, hired him and Lily as apprentices in his epic battle with James Pierpont Morgaunt for the soul of the city? Will the evil genius who is trying to kill Thomas Edison manage to blame it all on the Jewish kid and start a pogrom right here in the new world? Can the good guys who don't wield magic, including Houdini and Teddy Roosevelt, have any impact? And why is Emma Goldman absent from this novel?

In Harry Potter, the wizarding world and the world of Muggles—the ordinary, boring, unmagical people—are at first kept separate, barely impacting one another. Author J.K. Rowling's portrayal of the Muggles so captures the contempt that typical bohemians, Beats, hippies, Deadheads, and such have had for the stodgy bourgeoisie that I always took her magical folk to be an extrapolation of the counterculture. While the evil magicians eventually cause havoc in the Muggle world, the good ones only want to stay safely separate from it.

In Moriarty's book, there aren't two worlds, only one. Magic isn't a counterculture. It is everyone's folk culture. At first it seems that it is a culture in the process of being banished as the machine age gathers speed, as in so many modern fantasy stories, from Peter Pan onward. But unlike in those stories, where the advance of capitalism, productivity, rationalism, and money spell the death of spells, in this story it turns out that the baddest barons are the biggest magic users of all. They are trying to monopolize magic!

Unlike Doctorow, who portrayed J.P. Morgan with some human sympathy, Moriarty paints J.P. Morgaunt (only the bad guys get their names magicked) as pure evil: "He's killing New York," says Houdini. "He's sucking the magic out of it, and if we don't stop him there'll be nothing but an empty shell." But the nonappearance of Emma Goldman is telling. Goldman does show alongside Morgan, Houdini, and other historical figures in Ragtime, E.L Doctorow's fictional story of a Jewish immigrant family trying to make it in New York that seems to have been a major inspiration for Moriarty. But neither Goldman nor any other Left organizers appear in The Inquisitor's Apprentice. The only ones who can really stand up to Morgaunt are magically talented individuals like Wolf and, we hope, Sacha. Organized labor is nowhere to be seen. This is a shift from history to romantic individualism. Is there no magic in popular campaigns against big money? Is children's fiction too conservative for that?

So no magical glow is infused into progressive organizing, but what about Jewish culture and the Big Apple? I'm no expert on stories of magical New York. I'd be delighted to know if any can hold a candle to Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, which I found stunning in its ability to evoke myth and magic of true originality without recourse to the usual casts of fantasy novels. But this one makes a good attempt, mainly because it is rooted in genuine Jewish immigrant experience. The members of Moriarty's Jewish family are the best characters in her book, described...