An often engaging story that will likely appeal to readers with an interest in genealogy, immigration history, or Jewish...
Cohen’s debut novel offers a fictionalized account of her immigrant grandfather and first-generation American grandmother as they struggle to grow up in New York City at the turn of the 20th century.
Isadore Goldshlager is a young, Romanian Jew who’s living in the town of Iasi at the outset of this story. The general anti-Semitic attitude of the Romanian government, as well as increasing violence against Jewish citizens, inspires him to get his parents’ permission to immigrate to America with a friend at the tender age of 15. Across the ocean in New York City, Gussie Brotman, the American-born daughter of Polish immigrants, is struggling to deal with the recent death of her father and the increasing demands on her time by her single mother, who needs help raising Gussie’s younger siblings. The narrative alternates between these two main characters as they steadily age, recounting the immigration challenges they faced, their encounters with bigotry, and their difficulties meeting family expectations and achieving the American dream. It’s easy to sympathize with the hardworking Isadore, who feels stuck without a trade, and who’s less attractive and successful than his younger brother. Gussie, too, is relatable as a young woman who’s cut off from school and peers, stuck babysitting her younger brother, and fantasizing while reading books that she borrows from the library. Although this fictional story draws upon the author’s family history, it’s not so sentimental that strangers will find it inaccessible. Indeed, anyone whose family has experienced the hardships of immigration and assimilation will appreciate the book’s message. In straightforward, matter-of-fact prose, Cohen portrays her characters’ foibles as well as their virtues. There are some mentions of unexplained Jewish customs and traditions, and some readers may need to do research to fully understand them. Overall, though, this book is appropriate for readers in their early teens and older.
An often engaging story that will likely appeal to readers with an interest in genealogy, immigration history, or Jewish history.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5411-7036-0
Page Count: 232
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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SEEN & HEARD
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