January 1, 2023
In The Wind Knows My Name, the celebrated Allende blends two bitter tales of separation: in 1938 Vienna, Samuel Adler is placed on a Kindertransport train by his mother so that he can escape the Nazis, while in 2019 Arizona, Anita D�az is pulled from her mother at the U.S. border after they have fled El Salvador for safety. In the latest from multi-award-winning Israeli author Appelfeld, Tel Aviv shopkeeper Yaakov Fine decides to travel to Poland, A Green Land, to visit his parents' ancestral village and is delighted by all he sees until he tries to purchase the tombstones from the Jewish cemetery desecrated during the Holocaust. With Be Mine, Pulitzer Prize winner Ford offers his final Frank Bascombe novel, with Frank in his twilight years facing the heart-shredding task of tending a son diagnosed with ALS (100,000-copy first printing). Following the Reese's Book Club Pick His Only Wife, Medie's Nightbloom features Selasi and Akorfa, cousins and best female friends in Ghana until Selasi becomes angry and withdrawn for reasons that take decades to emerge. In I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, her first novel in over a decade, PEN/Malamud and Rea Award winner Moore plumbs love and mortality in a tale interweaving vanished journals, a visit to a dying brother, and the questionable death of a therapy clown and an assassin. A novel-in-stories like Rachman's 500,000-copy best-selling debut, The Imperfectionists, The Impostors sets end-of-rope novelist Dora Frenhofer the task of completing her final book in pandemic lockdown, as she comes to understand her own life by contemplating her missing brother, estranged daughter, lost lover, and one enduring friend (40,000-copy first printing). In the New York Times best-selling Schulman's Lucky Dogs, two women (one a U.S. television star seeking anonymity) forge a friendship while waiting on an ice cream line in Paris, but despite a shared history of having experienced male violence, one will betray the other. From Slimani, author of the New York Times best-booked The Perfect Nanny, Watch Us Dance portrays biracial siblings in late 1960s Morocco (their father is Moroccan, their mother French) who deal differently with the era's uncertainties; tough-minded Aicha wants to study medicine in France, while her rebellious younger brother Selim would rather hang out with the hippies converging on his country.
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April 24, 2023
Appelfeld (To the Edge of Sorrow), who died in 2018, offers an engrossing tale of a Jewish man’s return to his ancestral village. Yaakov Fein has prospered since he turned his late parents’ Tel Aviv textile business into a women’s fashion shop, but he is struggling with an unhappy marriage and an empty nest. He’s long wanted to visit Szydowce, Poland, the farming village where his parents were born and his grandparents and other Jews were murdered during WWII, and decides to finally make the trip. There, he’s captivated by the green pastures and the swirling river, and by Magda, a beautiful farmer who knew his grandparents and tells him about his family. But the visit turns sour after he picks up on antisemitism from some locals, and the mayor attempts to extort him after he offers to buy the Jewish cemetery’s broken tombstones. Appelfeld structures the narrative in dreamed conversations between Yaakov and his deceased mother, which offer an account of what his parents couldn’t tell him when they were alive: that as a young married couple during WWII, they hid in cellars, a cowshed, and in the forest, and his grandparents were burned alive in their synagogue. The dreams are vivid and economically written, and the unsettling, unresolved ending adds heft. This powerful, bittersweet performance does not disappoint.
Starred review from May 1, 2023
On a visit to the Polish village where his late parents were born and his grandparents perished in the Holocaust, Tel Aviv shop owner Yaakov Fein finds love with a gentile farmer and hate in the form of festering antisemitism. No physical evidence remains of the Jewish families who lived in tiny Szydowce, but Yaakov, whose coldly distant wife opposes the trip, hopes that merely by being there he will learn things that were kept from him by his parents. They survived the Nazis by hiding in the forest (as did young Appelfeld). Magda, the kindly farmer who takes Yaakov in and quickly becomes the love of his life, provides valuable memories, having worked in his grandparents' house. His encounters with other villagers are unsettling. They claim they don't know anything about the wartime massacre of Szydowce's Jews, who were locked inside a synagogue and burned alive. Their hatred of Jews surfaces after Yaakov discovers that after the massacre, tombstones from the Jewish cemetery were broken up and used as cornerstones for the town square. His attempts to acquire the stones, including his grandfather's, are met with derision by the manipulative mayor, who sets an exorbitant price for them and rips Yaakov for turning it down. "There are people for whom money is God," he says. "They can't be changed. Even God himself can't change them." Appelfeld (1932-2018), who didn't often make explicit references to the Holocaust in his fiction and uses that word only once here, attains raw emotion with his account of the horrific violence. The book, in which Yaakov's dreams play an important role, has a fuzzy, dreamlike quality itself, leading to a more detached ending than in masterpieces such as The Age of Wonders (1981) and The Conversion (1992). But this 2005 work, being published in English for the first time, still haunts. A powerful and timely addition to Appelfeld's great body of work.
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