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Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye. A Farm Called Kishinev. Nairobi, Kenya. East African Educational Publishers (African Books Collective, distr.). 2005. 138 pages. £11.95 / $14.95. ISBN 9966-25-418-8
THE MAJOR FICTIONAL preoccupation of the preeminent British-born Kenyan writer Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye has been the projection of what she sees as the indivisible wholeness of the history of the Kenyan nation. Following such works as Coming to Birth (1986), The Present Moment (1987), and Homing In (1994), in which she turned her attention to the lives of the indigenous Kenyan peoples and the white community, in her latest novel, A Farm Called Kishinev, she has drawn a fairly comprehensive picture of the Kenyan Jewish experience.
The main protagonist of the novel is Isaac Wilder, a Polish Jew, who, as a young man in 1899 migrated to London. Eight years...