Painful, riveting, personal, and powerfully universal.
Historian and novelist Slotkin (The Long Road to Antietam, 2012, etc.) writes more personally in these linked semifictional stories based on his ancestors’ immigration from Eastern Europe early in the 20th century.
Slotkin makes clear that these stories are based on a range of experiences within his own family. “The Gambler” is about a poker-playing butcher in pre–World War II Brooklyn who's still questioning his decision to emigrate in 1902 without his wife and sons and then not send for them until he felt financially ready four years later, and it sets up the challenges explored throughout the book: the impossible choices faced by immigrants like the butcher, who feels that “in winning he lost”; why some immigrants adapt while others can’t; the emotional cost of leaving one’s homeland, however inhospitable it’s become. Slotkin’s only female protagonist, sophisticated Upper West Sider Cousin Bella, is also unique in the wealth and education she enjoyed as a girl on what the immigrants here call “The Other Side.” Whether thanks to her early advantages or the steady resilience she inherited from her father, she successfully remakes herself in America after her father’s brutal murder by czarist forces during the Russian Revolution. In "Honor," by contrast, a formerly successful grain merchant fails to adapt in America, clinging to values like trust and honor that betray him once he loses the trappings of success. As if Slotkin is arguing Talmudically with himself, that same value system works to several immigrants’ advantage in the next story, "The Milkman," in which the title character defines what it is to be a mensch, a good man, whose trust and honor bring unexpected rewards to himself and others. Then comes a counterpunch to optimism, the all too relevant tragedy “Uncle Max and Cousin Yossi,” examining the permanent emotional damage caused when a 4-year-old boy is violently wrenched from his family and thought dead only to reappear months later. The humor of Slotkin’s end piece, “Greenhorn Nation: A History in Jokes,” is pointed to say the least.
Painful, riveting, personal, and powerfully universal.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-935248-99-6
Page Count: 186
Publisher: Leapfrog
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
This first novel, ostensibly about the friendship between two boys, Reuven and Danny, from the time when they are fourteen on opposing yeshiva ball clubs, is actually a gently didactic differentiation between two aspects of the Jewish faith, the Hasidic and the Orthodox. Primarily the Hasidic, the little known mystics with their beards, earlocks and stringently reclusive way of life. According to Reuven's father who is a Zionist, an activist, they are fanatics; according to Danny's, other Jews are apostates and Zionists "goyim." The schisms here are reflected through discussions, between fathers and sons, and through the separation imposed on the two boys for two years which still does not affect their lasting friendship or enduring hopes: Danny goes on to become a psychiatrist refusing his inherited position of "tzaddik"; Reuven a rabbi.... The explanation, in fact exegesis, of Jewish culture and learning, of the special dedication of the Hasidic with its emphasis on mind and soul, is done in sufficiently facile form to engage one's interest and sentiment. The publishers however see a much wider audience for The Chosen. If they "rub their tzitzis for good luck,"—perhaps—although we doubt it.
Pub Date: April 28, 1967
ISBN: 0449911543
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1967
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