OVER THERE

Rubin presents a family medical drama set against struggles on the battlefield and on the home front during World War I.

It’s May 1917, just one month after the United States officially entered the First World War. As the story opens, Miriam Levine, a 20-something nurse and survivor of polio, is about to wed surgeon Eli Drucker, with whom she works at New York City’s Beth Israel Hospital. Witnessing the joyful event are Miriam’s beloved aunt, obstetrician/gynecologist Hannah Kahn, and her husband, Ben Kahn, chief of the medical staff at Mount Sinai Hospital. Word from the front is that the allied forces are suffering massive casualties. Medical personnel are enlisting, leaving New York hospitals severely understaffed. Over the strenuous objections of their wives, Ben and Eli join the flood of doctors and nurses headed to France—Ben to the American Hospital in Paris, and Eli to field hospitals. Hannah remains home to care for her 14-month-old daughter and her school-aged children, Albert and Anna, even as she contends with budding crises at Mount Sinai. Although Miriam wants to join Eli, the Red Cross rejects her because of her leg brace; however, a twist of fate will present her with an opportunity to serve in France. Part family drama, with an occasional dip into melodrama, and part historical exploration of the medical side of the horrors of trench warfare, Rubin’s narrative maintains a steady pace by alternating first-person narration among the novel’s four uncommon main characters. She focuses not upon the battles themselves, but on their grisly consequences, which left hundreds of thousands of men with life-altering injuries: “Scores of men every waking hour were ambulanced to our hospital, in a flood of screaming, bloody bodies spilling out their insides over their stretchers onto the cobbled streets.” In the stories of Eli and Ben, readers witness dramatic medical innovations as the surgeons and nurses implement new methods for avoiding amputations and develop reconstructive surgeries for head and facial disfigurements. Through accounts of Hannah and her children, Rubin vividly depicts the trauma of war for those on the home front.

Compelling, disturbing, and historically rich.