A sometimes-charming, sometimes-tedious Winesburg, Ohio–style look at the life of a synagogue.
Three generations of Jews clash in their search for fulfillment in this novel in stories from Taub, author of Prodigal Children in the House of G-d (2018).
When Arnold Kestenberg, the entrepreneurial founder of Kestenberg’s Car Service, can’t find a seat at his yeshiva student–dominated synagogue, he decides to start his own. After all, how hard can it be? And so Congregation Haverim Ahuvim is born, the Orthodox synagogue with a twist: It has no rabbi. As Arnold explains to his co-founders: “We will lead each other.…We will care for each other. This will be a synagogue of comrades, in the spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood.” The congregation is a success—sort of—creating a multigenerational community of people whose lives and families intersect over the decades. Their individual struggles represent the constant tension between tradition and modernity at play in Haverim Ahuvim—and in Judaism itself. There is Yehudah Ariel, the principal of the Torah and Midot Academy, the closest thing to a spiritual authority the synagogue possesses and a man still figuring life out. There is the boy—and later man—Yehoshua Weissman, who is forced to keep his sexual orientation secret from the congregation, though many people already know it. There is Yehuda’s daughter Braynah, an artist who decides to hold a retrospective of her work in the synagogue—and whose art becomes a method of preserving the past. Taub’s measured prose adeptly captures the personalities and worldviews of his characters: “Mame never used any of the cleansers and creams from the department or specialty stores for her face, either. There too, it was just plain soap. Not dish soap, of course, but hand and body soap. Mame’s face had been a testament to the wisdom of her practice.” The book is slower and less zany than it initially appears to be, and the lack of serious drama in the lives of several characters who temporarily receive the spotlight can make for dull moments. The author succeeds in immersing the reader in this very particular, very Jewish world, however, which seems to have been his goal. Those who are interested in the daily rhythms of such a community will not be disappointed.
A sometimes-charming, sometimes-tedious Winesburg, Ohio–style look at the life of a synagogue.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68114-524-2
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Anaphora Literary Press
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2020
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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