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THE WORLDS WE THINK WE KNOW

Name: THE WORLDS WE THINK WE KNOW
Author: Dalia Rosenfeld
ISBN: 978-1-57131-126-9

by Dalia Rosenfeld ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 9, 2017

This collection charms with quiet, wry humor.

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Stories about Jewish life—in all its painful absurdity—in the United States and in Israel.

Rosenfeld’s debut book of stories is funny, touching, awkward, and wry. In most of the stories, not all that much happens: instead, Rosenfeld deals with the quotidian and the absurd. In the title story, a young woman volunteers to keep an elderly Holocaust survivor company. Mostly, she watches him eat onions. “Lotzi ate it with bread, one slice for every three bites of onion, and washed it down with a cup of tepid Wissotzky made from old teabags reduced to the size of walnuts.” In “A Foggy Day,” a girl takes piano lessons. In “The Other Air,” a woman can’t stop sighing. Almost all the stories are told in the first person, and most of these narrators share a common voice. Then, too, there are certain images, or motifs, that recur throughout many of the stories: lemon trees, migraines, pianos, and books—more than books: some of her characters read compulsively, for hours, for days, almost unceasingly. Rosenfeld writes with a dry, sardonic deadpan. Her characters are lonely, homely, maladroit creatures. In “Vignette of the North,” the owner of a vegetable stand finds that an artist across the way has painted her stand. “Simona stared at a crumb that had settled on the painter’s beard and wished it away. As the object of artistic inspiration, she felt almost entitled to brush it off herself.” She invites him to her home to finish the painting “without all the distractions of the market.” She expects him to add her into the painting. He might as well stay for dinner. “I’m a very good cook,” she informs him. Inevitably, she’s disappointed. Readers won’t be.

This collection charms with quiet, wry humor.

Pub Date: May 9, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-57131-126-9

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Milkweed

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | SHORT STORIES

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THE LIGHT AFTER THE WAR

by Anita Abriel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 4, 2020

A predictable romance tempers the energy of this tale about the healing powers of love.

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Having escaped from a train headed to Auschwitz, Vera and Edith, two young Hungarian women, mourn their parents as well as Edith’s fiance, all likely lost to the Holocaust. Can they forge new lives in the postwar world?

After surviving the war by working on a farm, Vera and Edith realize their hometown of Budapest holds little promise. Fortuitously, a kind American officer sends them to Naples with a letter recommending Vera to the embassy. Once there, Vera, who is fluent in five languages, readily secures a job as secretary to Capt. Anton Wight, an American officer at the embassy. She’s intent upon taking care of Edith, who’s looking for male attention, which she finds with Marcus, a photographer ready to sweep her away dancing and maybe into social ruin. But it’s Vera who falls in love first, with the dashing Capt. Wight, who treats her to dinner dates and gifts. Although Vera tells Anton about her experiences during the war, including her guilt over surviving while her family presumably perished in the gas chambers, her attraction to him quickly outweighs any lingering trauma. However, Anton’s struggles with his own past derail their romance, plunging Vera into more heartache as her path traverses the globe. The romance between Vera and Capt. Wight is, unfortunately, much too easy, beginning with its inevitable whirlwind courtship. Publishing for the first time under her birth name, Abriel (Christmas in Vermont, 2019, etc., written as Anita Hughes) was inspired by her mother's life, and she deftly sketches the postwar world from Naples to Venezuela and Australia, with attention paid to the changed architectural and emotional landscapes. The rubble of bombed cities, the blank map of lost relatives, and the uncertainty of day-to-day survival outline the anguish of the lost generation.

A predictable romance tempers the energy of this tale about the healing powers of love.

Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-2297-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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RUNAWAY

STORIES

by Alice Munro ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 14, 2004

In a word: magnificent.

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Retrospect and resolution, neither fully comprehended nor ultimately satisfying: such are the territories the masterful Munro explores in her tenth collection.

Each of its eight long tales in the Canadian author’s latest gathering (after Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001, etc.) bears a one-word title, and all together embrace a multiplicity of reactions to the facts of aging, changing, remembering, regretting, and confronting one’s mortality. Three pieces focus on Juliet Henderson, a student and sometime teacher of classical culture, who waits years (in “Chance”) before rediscovering romantic happiness with the middle-aged man with whom she had shared an unusual experience during a long train journey. In “Soon,” Juliet and her baby daughter Penelope visit Juliet’s aging parents, and she learns how her unconventional life has impacted on theirs. Then, in “Silence,” a much older Juliet comes sorrowfully to terms with the emptiness in her that had forever alienated Penelope, “now living the life of a prosperous, practical matron” in a world far from her mother’s. Generational and familial incompatibility also figure crucially in “Passion,” the story (somewhat initially reminiscent of Forster’s Howards End) of a rural girl’s transformative relationship with her boyfriend’s cultured, “perfect” family—and her realization that their imperfections adumbrate her own compromised future. Further complexities—and borderline believable coincidences and recognitions—make mixed successes of “Trespasses,” in which a young girl’s unease about her impulsive parents is shown to stem from a secret long kept from her, and “Tricks,” an excruciatingly sad account of a lonely girl’s happenstance relationship with the immigrant clockmaker she meets while attending a Shakespeare festival, the promise she tries and helplessly fails to keep, and the damaging misunderstanding that, she ruefully reasons, “Shakespeare should have prepared her.” Then there are the masterpieces: the title story’s wrenching portrayal of an emotionally abused young wife’s inability to leave her laconic husband; and the brilliant novella “Powers,” which spans years and lives, a truncated female friendship that might have offered sustenance and salvation, and contains acute, revelatory discriminations between how women and men experience and perceive “reality.”

In a word: magnificent.