A bighearted novel about the past’s refusal to recede.
In Bornstein’s debut novel, an American Jew’s story unfolds simultaneously across two timelines.
Born in Paris to Jews from Poland and Morocco and raised in both Israel and Brooklyn, the polyglot Bram Goodman represents the whole of the Diaspora. In 1983, Bram, recently discharged from the Israeli Defense Force and fresh from a summer in Côte d’Azur teaching wealthy children to swim, has just returned to his semi-hometown of New York City. He’s followed a girl there: Liz Ellis, an idealistic Columbia Law grad (and gentile) from Arizona who’s just taken a job at a legal nonprofit. Falling in love with Liz helps distract Bram from the fact that he hasn’t yet grappled with the death of his Israeli cousin, Yoni, who died by suicide following their service in the Lebanon War. In 2015, 32 years later, a middle-aged Bram occupies an entirely different position in life. He and Liz are living in Queens with three kids and a pair of ornery upstairs tenants. Bram serves as the executive director of The Linden Hills Community House, located in a mostly Black neighborhood of south Brooklyn. His progressive 17-year-old daughter, Jenna, is critical of all things Israel, while his youngest, Theo, is preparing to undergo his bar mitzvah. The specter of a Trump presidency hangs in the air, as does the ghost of Yoni, whose death—and what it means—Bram still hasn’t fully worked out. Tied up in Bram’s grief is a never-realized dream Yoni had for the two of them to swim the English Channel (“A two-way, back and forth,” he explains. “We’d be the first Israeli cousins to do so”). The novel alternates between the two timelines, which mirror and inform each other in unexpected ways, moving Bram (and the reader) inevitably back to Israel.
The author has an observant eye, summoning both eras of New York in brilliant detail and persuasively depicting the same characters at very different times of life. The dialogue is particularly sharp and laden with dark humor, as when Bram dismisses Theo’s worry that any Jews in New York would vote for Donald Trump: “ ‘Dylan Mandelbaum told me his father thinks Trump would be good for Israel.’ ‘Dylan Mandelbaum’s father would probably go to Dr. Mengele for a second opinion.’ ” At one point Bram praises Philip Roth, and Bram’s preoccupations—how to be both an Israeli Jew and a secular American progressive with a shiksa wife—feel very much of the generation raised on Roth’s novels. It’s possible that younger readers will not find these concerns quite so compelling. There are some pacing issues as well: The book is long at 470 pages, and its plot accumulates more than unfurls. Even so, scene by scene, chapter by chapter, the novel is a pleasure to read. At all times, the writing displays a keen wit and a deep sense of history. It’s a great novel of New York in the Trump era and a tender look at the way the progression of time makes immigrants of us all.
A bighearted novel about the past’s refusal to recede.Pub Date: May 30, 2023
ISBN: 979-8886790382
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Luminare Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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