A unique, musical novel that highlights the cultural riches people can offer one another in difficult circumstances.
The last survivor of a small Jewish sect comes to America after World War II to live in a Black community in Mississippi in Langer’s novel.
Long ago, Reb Shmuel Meir Lichtbencher (also called Sam Lightup) was born in Dekrepitz, a small Polish shtetl. Shmuel, the grandson of the Rebbe (Rabbi), knows little of the outside world. At the outset of World War II, a Russian officer witnesses Shmuel’s fiddle playing and sends him to a conservatory in Moscow. Shmuel survives the war, but everyone who remained in Dekreptiz, including his young wife and baby, is gone. Somehow, he ends up in Naples, and some Black American soldiers he’d been playing music with smuggle him aboard their ship. In America, at the home of his new friend, everyone wonders what this strange man, who doesn’t speak English, is doing in Leesboro, Mississippi. Shmuel knows how to raise and slaughter chickens, so they set him up with a place in the woods to do just that. A local woman, Lula Curtin, comes by to help him learn English and becomes interested in his religion. Shmuel, now known as Sam Lightup, begins talking like a Mississippi bluesman (“Ain’t no Dekrepitzers since the war”). Sam and Lula eventually marry, but, as an interracial couple, they face danger in Mississippi. Langer’s musical protagonist travels between worlds in a tremendously authentic way—the cross-cultural story is as at home in Europe as it is in the Mississippi Delta. The connections made, whether personal or musical (such as the relationship of Jewish vocal music to American blues), illustrate the commonalities between survivors in hostile environments. Perhaps the affinity portrayed between dispossessed Jews and American Blacks is a bit optimistic here, but the rural southern setting makes the story work.
A unique, musical novel that highlights the cultural riches people can offer one another in difficult circumstances.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798991109703
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Cresheim Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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BOOK REVIEW
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