Michael Chabon, in this homage to the pulp adventures of the early to mid-twentieth century, here gives us a classic tale of two bickering partners, equally skilled in survival and combat, on a seemingly endless quest, traveling mercenaries qua vagabonds, keen on turning a quick profit and yet driven by deeper concerns. The Abyssinian Jew, Amram, is wandering the world in search of a kidnapped daughter and, after a ten year stint in the service of the Byzantines, has hooked up with a renegade scholar and physician from the Jewish quarter of Regensburg, a German township in the West. The hook here is that both these adventurers are Jews, something that seems an anomaly at the time when this book is set since Jews of that era were mostly merchants, scholars and physicians, a people largely marginalized by the other ethnic groups among whom they moved. Chabon has put these adventurers in the orbit of the Khazar Empire, a land barely remembered today which surprised its contemporaries and later historians by adopting the Jewish faith.

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