BLOOD PUDDING

In this historical novel, a young Polish immigrant in Pennsylvania struggles under the mercurial despotism of his father.

In 1911, Tadeusz Malinowski—everyone calls him Taddy or Tad—moves with his family from Poland to the United States when he is only 8 weeks old. They settle in western Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, led inconstantly by Tad’s father, Ignaz, or Jumbo as he is often called, who dishonestly insists that he has a royal bloodline. Of all the siblings, Tad is the favorite of his mother, Eva—he is a sweet boy who diligently looks after his older brother, Ziggy, who is mentally disabled, dismissively counted to be among the “low IQ unfortunates.” The entire family suffers under Jumbo’s delusions of grandeur and infantile spirit—he is talented and enterprising but also viciously violent and selfish. When he falls into financial arrears, he takes to alcohol—for a time, he’s a bootlegger who largely supplies himself with booze—and routinely beats Eva, who fecklessly tries to hide her bruises from the children. When Eva dies—Tad, the narrator of the story, is only 10 at the time—Jumbo only worsens his tyrannical grip over the family, sexually abusing his own daughter, Vera. Tad is haunted by guilt over his mother’s death—he furtively helped her perform an abortion on herself, a gruesome procedure that ended her life, chillingly described by Cox. Eva tells Tad she needs help discarding some blood pudding: “What I dumped into the hole was not blood pudding. It was bloody, all right, but it looked like a little lifeless red and purple tadpole. At one end, it had some little purple fins coming out from it. It had a long vein wrapped around it that ended in a soft, lumpy pool of black clots.” In heartbreakingly poignant terms, Tad relates his struggle to love his father, a complicated man who by turns invites admiration and contempt: “My love for Jumbo is a bitter task of loyalty.”

The author’s plot can take on a desultory, meandering quality—it often reads like a series of impressionist recollections rather than a tightly structured story. But a sense of thematic unity begins to slowly emerge, accompanied by a thoughtful reflection on the very nature of remembrance. Tad muses about his mother: “My dreams are different from my memories, which are gleaned through this unquenchable urge to dig into the past. This compulsion began abruptly with her death and continued relentlessly for many years. Regrettably, this process exposed me again and again to the pain, but it always seemed worth it. I could not stop it.” The novel often intentionally feels like a memoir—Cox’s literacy conceit is that the book is found years later by Tad’s son, not to be read until a century after Eva’s death. The author’s storytelling can be punishingly gritty—one particular scene in which Tad is brutally raped by an adult is as difficult to read as it is to forget. Fortunately, there is more to this tale than despair and woes—there is plenty of humor as well as hope to lighten readers’ loads.

A moving tale of an immigrant child’s trials.