LELYA DORCHE AND THE CONEY ISLAND CURE

In Rothman’s debut novel, a father goes to the ends of the earth to save his son from Covid-19.

In early April 2020, the world has changed a lot over the last month. Covid-19 has descended upon New York with a fury, a fact that no one knows better than Andrew Gruber. He’s the assistant director of a funeral home in Jackson Heights, Queens, which is currently the “epicenter of the epicenter” of the pandemic. Things were grim enough when it was just Andrew’s neighbors getting sick, but now his severely asthmatic son, Miro, has tested positive for the disease (his 85-year-old parents might have it, too). After exhausting the powers of modern scientific medicine—the doctor’s advice is simply to wait and see—Andrew visits Lelya Dorche, a Roma witch doctor who works out of an abandoned post office in Coney Island. “Helped save my grandfather from polio when he was a kid,” Andrew’s best friend, Cleon Jones, assures him. “That lady should get the Nobel Prize for Medicine.” However, Lelya will only help Andrew if he agrees to travel to his wife’s native Bulgaria to procure twenty liters of rare Macedonian pine sap. How exactly will Andrew do that when every flight to Europe is grounded? If he wants to save his family, he’ll have to figure it out quickly. Rothman captures the sense of panic and desperation that characterized the first few months of the pandemic, when parents would make any conceivable sacrifice, however incredible, to protect their child. The tone is a mix of breathless urgency and absurd comedy, as when Andrew is given a hen to take with him on an illegal biplane flight: “They forgot to give us food for the bird!” complains his pilot. “How often do they eat?” Some readers may not be ready for a Covid-19 novel, but Rothman does an excellent job reminding us of the human stories at the center of the crisis.

A big-hearted novel about parenthood in a pandemic.