The Airship is the entrancing fictional biography of Nathan Cohen, who was deported from the US in 1912 under the Alien Act and spent the first years of World War I on a passenger ship, shuttled between the US and Argentina. Newspapers called him “The Wandering Jew” and “The Man Without a Country,” speculating he would spend the rest of his life at sea.
Adam Tipps Weinstein provides a wise, rich, nuanced, and mischievous exploration of Cohen’s emigration from Bauska, in the Russian Pale of Settlement, to Las Pampas, in Argentina. 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.
Told through a series of incantations—spells, songs, folk tales, ghosts, charms—the book traces Cohen’s biography across time and a great expanse of geography. The concepts of home and homeland are stretched until they break. Was there ever a home? The Airship incants these paradoxes of location, nationality, faith, and belonging, and finally, the wish to find a new line of flight.
