“One of the chief pleasures of Moshe Zvi Marvit’s sweeping family saga Nothing Vast is the way it transports you to places and times that feel soothingly distant from here and now. His characters move from Morocco and Poland to France, America, and Israel, and we meet them at various times between 1932 and 1973. Here is the sweet, foamy tea of 1935 Casablanca, poured from high above the table to keep the sand out; there, the “grimy” port city of 1956 Marseille and the boiling America of 1965, where “workers were rising up against fat business owners called pigs and taking over the factories.” Being immersed in these worlds and periods, however turbulent, is a pleasure, even though part of the point is that they aren’t really so distant after all. As Faulkner might have put it, the past of a family or nation is never dead; it’s not even past.” Raina Lipsitz at The Metropolitan Review
“As these and other characters pop up and then disappear, only to reemerge later, the effect can be disorienting. Nevertheless, Marvit’s novel explores themes of truth and justice with nuance and precision. Thoughtful, intricate, and ambitious, Nothing Vast invites readers to consider history and its generational ripple effect. Derived from Antigone, the title refers to how “nothing was simple or painless” — but the book itself is vast in both scope and message. Its characters reflect the decisions and outcomes, good and bad, that come with being human.“ Jewish Book Council
“Like a latter-day Joseph Roth, Moshe Marvit writes with dizzying breadth and ambition, chasing ghosts and djinns and the ordinary mysteries of families living through less-than-ordinary times. Nothing Vast is a story about stories—remembered, forgotten, invented, and erased—that plunges into the void at the center of Zionist myth and identity. This is a brave, tender, thoughtful book.”
—Ben Ehrenreich, author of The Way to the Spring
“Nothing Vast is a rich, intelligent and lucid multigenerational narrative, spanning contexts and continents, weaving archival work with fiction, intertwining the catastrophic histories that make up the stories of nations with the small vicissitudes and moments of mercy that undergird individual lives. This book offers a compelling depiction of trauma, ideological fervor, dispossession and buried memories, both individual and collective; of the siren’s call of violent nationalism, which ultimately offers a false and hollow facsimile of redemption; and of the impact of all of this on the human heart, and soul.”
—Moriel Rothman-Zecher, author of Before all the World and Sadness is a White Bird
“A beautifully written novel about Zionism as an idea, Israel as a reality, and how the distance between the two shapes Jewish lives.”
—Peter Beinart, author of The Crisis of Zionism
The Chicago Review of Books (11/26/2024): https://chireviewofbooks.com/2024/11/26/moshe-zvi-marvit-discusses-his-debut-nothing-vast-a-comic-by-coco-picard/
“This is a genuine Jewish narrative—historically, biographically and personally. Moshe Marvit’s family is dispersed from Morocco to Brooklyn plus places elsewhere and beyond, Nationalism is kept to a minimum, and all that matters is how they live and stay in touch and what they say (sometimes in Yiddish) to one another. By the time you finish this book, you feel like one of the family.”
Samuel Hazo, National Book Award finalist and first Poet Laureate of Pennsylvania
Moshe Z Marvit 