Luminous tales of exile and loss that bequeath new life.
Jewish families pull apart under the strain of war, persecution, and longing in Berkman’s story collection.
This set of stories explores the Jewish experience in a wide variety of historical settings. “Passion” paints a plangent yet exuberant portrait of 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose rationalist questioning of Scripture gets him banished from Amsterdam’s synagogue. Several stories follow Eastern European Jews enmeshed in early-20th-century disasters. In the harrowing “Vilna,” two brothers in World War II–era Lithuania separate; one escapes to America while the other weathers the Nazi occupation as it destroys the local Jewish population. “In the Time of Dreams” follows a woman living in the Soviet Union’s Jewish colony in Siberia in the 1930s as it devolves from socialist idealism to a Stalinist nightmare; and in Miracles: A Novella, a family of Ukrainian Jews flees a pogrom to New York City—a strange new world that makes them seem like strangers to one another. A suite of stories are set in postwar California among middle-class Jewish suburbanites; for them, the Holocaust is a distant memory that barely shadows their comfortable but discontented lives. In “Ghosts,” a woman who fled Nazi Germany in childhood is estranged from her adopted daughter and mentally ill son; in “Grisha,” a son reconnects with his cantankerous mother after she moves to Jerusalem, where she finds her roots and a soul mate; and in the title story, a young mother’s affair with her rabbi upends two families but enables her to discover her true self. Berkman’s characters are wanderers—often physically, as they migrate to escape poverty and violence (“we said good-bye as though we would never see each other again,” is a typical refrain), but also spiritually, as they pursue desires that run up against social expectations or fraying relationships. Her stories are grounded in a realism made poetic, but they also have an aching sense of evanescent mystery, as in “Ghosts”: “There was a shadow family and shadow cousins and aunts and uncles, and a shadow place with a strange name where her mother had grown up.” The result is an engrossing fictional world with real literary depth.
Luminous tales of exile and loss that bequeath new life.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 451
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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