In the city of Ersilia, the citizens stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or zebra’d, to show the relationships that exist between them, whether of blood or trade or friendship. In time, Ersilia’s streets will be cat’s-cradled, impassable, and that’s when the inhabitants, as one, will up stakes and leave. Elsewhere they’ll build themselves a new Ersilia; again they’ll start with the strings. This city, too, they’ll one day have to abandon, as they will the next, and the next, for ever after.

I was remembering the strange and wondrous yarn of Ersilia, which is from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), as I was reading The River Midnight, the first novel by Toronto writer Lilian Nattel. Now, these are two very different books. In Calvino, Marco Polo goes before the conqueror Kublai Khan and tells of the cities he’s seen. Invisible Cities,/I> is a collection of elegant fables, each one as fine and fragile as sunlight in a dream. Nattel, meanwhile, delivers us to a Polish shtetl, a Jewish settlement established by government decree, circa 1894, and while there’s magic at work in her story, it’s less stylized, the altogether earthier work of a writer reaching for authenticity.

And, in large part, grasping it. Calvino’s image of Ersilia is both typically lucent and typically incisive in its symbolism: a community is, of course, strung together by its human relationships. But in Calvino, every relationship is an entanglement waiting to happen. Wherever the people of Ersilia build their city anew, the future is always standstill.

The River Midnight is about community and the relationships that sustain it, too. Except that in Nattel’s model, the filaments connecting the citizens of the Polish village of Blaszka aren’t quite so constricting. There are more of them, perhaps, strings of stories and gossip, cords of religious observance, guys of social protocol to go with all that relationship twine. And yet in Blaszka, the crisscross is unentangling, navigable. It’s the life of the place. It holds everything up, in. It spools out and retrieves stray souls, wanderers from home. But then perhaps crisscross doesn’t do The River Midnight the justice it deserves. There’s more art to it than that, more assurance. To read this novel is to watch Nattel as she weaves a marvellous, meticulous fabric of family, friendship, myth, and memory.

Blaszka, in Nattel’s telling, is tiny, “less than a dot on the map,” somewhere not far from Warsaw. Nearby flows the river Polnocna – the river Midnight itself. The end of the century may be nearing, but in Blaszka, time almost seems to be ticking the other way. People remember the pogroms of ’81, the epidemics of cholera, typhus. Warsaw isn’t so far – and yet such a distance. “A city like a marble palace with a thousand rooms,” as one character puts it, “and look at Blaszka, a hut with a mud floor.”

From the start, we’re plunged deep in the life of the village, sounds (Yiddish and Polish, music, snatches of Torah, the clamour of the marketplace) and smells (mushroom soup, herrings, the bathhouse, the ritual slaughterer at work). And we’re introduced, in due course, to a community within the community, the four women whose interstitched stories propel the narrative.

Inseparable as children, Hanna-Leah, Zisa-Sara, Faygela, and Misha were called, with disapproval, vilda hayas, “wild animals.” Then they grew up – and apart. Hanna-Leah is married to the butcher, keeps his shop, and seeks solace as she bathes, at night, in the river. Zisa-Sara went away to America – and died there. Faygela wants out of Blaszka, but there are the children – one of whom, Ruthie, has just been arrested for distributing revolutionary pamphlets. And then there’s Misha, the midwife, who presides like some kind of earthbound goddess over all she surveys. Full of wit and wisdom, she’s a combination oracle and agony-aunt, a civic conscience and a public scold. She’s independent and mysterious, admired and feared. Also pregnant, although she won’t tell who the father is.

It’s around these four lives – along with, to a lesser extent, the saga of Ruthie’s imprisonment – that Nattel carefully, naturally, unspools her stories. The book proceeds at ease, a wandering pace, and that allows for all manner of diversions: Nattel salts in folklore and ghost stories, social studies, and plenty of good, solid Yiddish sense (“A fool is more useless than a barren woman”; “The day after your wedding, when your mother cuts your hair off, that’s your life falling on the floor”). The story takes us into taverns and meetings of the community council, into the surrounding woods with the vilda hayas. A troupe of travelling players stops into the village; there are excursions afield, too, in which we follow the fortunes of Faygela when she travels to Warsaw. And whether it’s out in the open – down by the banks of the wine-dark river – or in surroundings as intimate as Hanna-Leah’s troubled marriage bed, Nattel’s command of character and setting is not much short of marvellous.

If there are false notes, they are few. The several chapter-ending intrusions, for instance, whereby Nattel seeks to hook up with history, give us the wide view of world events and the future. It almost always feels imposed and awkward; worse, it wrenches us out of the close contact with the run of things in Blaszka.

Ersilia’s future may be forever standstill, but Blaszka’s, in 1894, was oblivion. As Nattel points out in an afterword, the shtetls are long-since gone, erased. No, not erased. They live, full of light and herrings and life, in the pages of The River Midnight.