ONE OF US

Centering on self-absorbed Jewish Generation Xers as they mature (or don’t) in 1980s and '90s New Jersey, many of these 18 stories have an autobiographical ring, but counterbalancing gravity comes from the smattering of tales about an earlier generation of Jews, real and fictional, facing concrete issues of survival.

Nadelson establishes the book's fundamental tone of ambivalence, doubt, and guilty regret in the opener, a sly, almost impersonal snapshot in which an upwardly mobile narrator identifies with the squatter who has invaded his former home. The narrator, or someone very like him, returns in the last story, “Going to Ground,” recalling the moment in his 20s when he was torn between a lover who felt too familiar and the risky adventure of travel. With the exception of a few tough, troubled women, like the high school outcast who gets revenge in “The Depths” or the failed actress who suffers humiliation in “Cut Loose,” Nadelson’s stories are dominated by boys and young men. The still innocent 14-year-old in “Sweet Ride” is fascinated by his neighbor, a high school nerd–turned–college dropout. On a spree through Europe, an imprudent recent college graduate spirals into ethical purgatory while avoiding the visit to Auschwitz he'd promised his mother. The men in “Safe and Sorry” and “Last Bus Home” both face their inability to protect endangered women because “the world was far more complicated than most people wanted.” Proof of that complexity comes through historic anecdotes—anti-Semitic author Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s romantic pursuit of Jewish sculptor Louise Nevelson (“Liberté”); Zero Mostel’s heroic blacklisting that led him to paint instead of act (“Butterfly at Rest”)—and semifictions about Jews in Depression-era Brooklyn (“The Payout”), Communist Russia (“The Cake”), and 1944 Berlin (“Caught”). Strikingly, the title story concerns Jews rejecting Jews. After her synagogue snubs her publicly disgraced family, a woman shrieks, “This is how you treat one of your own.”

A carefully curated volume on themes of personal and group identity—inclusion, rejection, escape.