Looking for a brief getaway? Try Chelm.

If you haven’t already made Izzy Abrahmson your travel agent, perhaps you should.

Abrahmson is the author of a half dozen wonderful, silly and yet quite serious novels set in Chelm, the mythical eastern European town of fools. But while the Chelm stories are a tradition in Jewish folklore, Abrahmson’s Chelm is anything but traditional. And with his latest entry in the series, The Council of Wise Women (Light Publications, 317 pages), Abrahmson provides a spirited and most-welcome destination for readers. Whether your trip to Abrahmson’s Chelm is a return visit or a maiden voyage, you’ll be glad you went.

This isn’t the Chelm of two-dimensional cartoonish characters enacting old slapstick routines. This Chelm is snuggled in an indeterminate past that never was but certainly should have been, a past filled with heart, humor, and genuine feeling. True, this is a Chelm still regarded as foolish by its neighbors but, as Abrahamson tells us, “wisdom or foolishness, it’s all a matter of perspective.”

The Council of Wise Women begins with the birth of Rachel and Yakov Cohen, twins born to Sarah and Benjamin, and follows them and their impact – particularly Rachel’s – on the town into their teenage years. This sweep gives the story ample space to breathe, to create wonderful episodes that don’t need to be hurried off stage right to make way for something new stage left. Yet the book doesn’t bog down anywhere; like any good book, when you come to the end, you wish there was just a little more so you could keep enjoying it.

The sweep of the story also gives its serious side the weight of reality. No spoilers here, but there is a troubled and ultimately bittersweet scent that clings to the personal journey of one of the protagonists, a journey that also has life-changing impacts on several other characters. As Dr. Who once said, “Everything ends and it’s always sad, but everything begins again too, and that’s always happy.”  The Council of Wise Women is a sad and happy novel about endings and beginnings.

Familiar characters return, such as Mrs. Chaipul, the proprietor of Chelm’s restaurant and a behind-the-scenes force propelling much that happens in this Chelm. She describes herself like this: “I’m a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a cook, a cleaner, a healer, a shopper, a bookkeeper, a reader, a lover, a yenta, a grandmother, a thinker, a planner, a comforter, an organizer, an adversary, and a friend.” She may have left out a few roles. New – to me, at least – is Oma Levitsky, an old woman who may be far older than anyone can imagine, and who keeps a possibly magic pot of chicken soup forever cooking on her stove, a pot that must never be allowed to boil dry.

One of the central figures in this book is the twin, Rachel Cohen. Much smarter than her brother Yakov, she bristles at being the child in the family who’s not allowed to attend the village’s all-male school. She gets in eventually, and becomes a trailblazer for the rest of the girls in the village. Rachel, along with Yakov, provide one of the fun set pieces in the book. Although they have the same birthday, there is no celebration for Rachel on the day that Yakov goes to the Torah to read the ancient text and become a Bar Mitzvah. Except Yakov freezes and can’t remember how to read it. Rachel comes up with a clever way both to help her brother get through the ceremony, and also satisfy her desire to recite the holy words.

Another great episode centers on an unlikely crisis in Chelm: When everyone in the neighboring town of Smyrna comes down with a cold, the Chelmites generously slaughter all their chickens and give up virtually all their vegetables to provide enough soup for stricken town. To deliver the soup, they form an impossibly long “chicken soup bucket brigade” that stretches continuously –but not without incident – from Chelm to Smyrna.

The Smyrnans are saved, but at a cost. The Chelmites have given away almost all of their food, the winter is harsh, and a famine descends on the luckless village. But one foodstuff remains: cabbage. Writes Abrahmson: “There was cabbage and only cabbage and plenty of cabbage… They had cabbage for breakfast, cabbage for lunch, and cabbage for dinner. They ate it baked, boiled, fried, rolled, and stuffed. What did they stuff it with? They stuffed it with cabbage.” The Chelmites make cabbage crackers, cabbage vodka, cabbage latkes, cabbage brisket with sauteed cabbage, and seventeen kinds of coleslaw and sauerkraut.

It’s with a complete and utter disgust of cabbage that the Chelmites enter their annual Kvetchfest, “the single most important gathering outside of the holy days.” At Kvetchfest, the Chelmites take turns demonstrating that “there is majesty, grandeur, zest, and art in its fullest, richest, and most ephemeral expression – the complaint.” The celebration ends in a completely unexpected, yet inevitable, slapstick climax. And, demonstrating Abrahmson’s great skill in balancing the bitter with the sweet, the hilarity turns on a dime to awful despair for one of the protagonists.

If you could use a respite from the world of tumult and tribulation, you would do well to spend a few hours in Izzy Abrahmson’s Chelm.