Recent Reviews
The First Desire by Nancy Reisman
Goldie Cohen is missing from her family’s home in Buffalo, New York. We learn this fact in the first few pages of Nancy Reisman’s absorbing and compelling novel, The First Desire. The year is 1929 and Goldie’s disappearance has thrown the Cohen family into turmoil. In her late twenties and the oldest of five adult children, Goldie directs the household after the recent death of their mother Rebecca. Has Goldie been kidnapped, has she fallen victim to a tragic accident or has she simply left?
Sister Sadie posts signs and notifies the police. After just a couple of weeks and deaf to the pleas of his grown children, Goldie’s father, Abe Cohen, decides that the family will sit Shiva. With this public pronouncement that “Goldie is dead to him", we learn that Goldie’s father believes Goldie has left the family. Abe Cohen’s patriarchal decision-making process gives us our first glance at his stubbornness, inflexibility and the emotional impact on his family.
Abe and Rebecca Cohen were born and raised in Poland where family traditions were rigid and choices few. The reliable routines of the Cohen’s family life in Buffalo provide both an oasis and a prison for the family. Except for Sadie, who lives with her husband Bill and their two daughters across town, the other four siblings live and work with their widowed father in the family jewelry store. Though the Cohen family members’ lives are intertwined, they each live on their own emotional island. They need each other and they resent each other. Their freedom is constrained by money, societal norms, and the customs of their Jewish faith.
However living in Buffalo, not Poland, has allowed these five adult siblings to consider their own needs. So though they remain diligent and dutiful to the family, they feel stifled and suffocated. By our modern sensibilities, they should enjoy the family camaraderie. Instead, the siblings feel oppressed by their roles and responsibilities. They experience the sweetness of being known by their family while seeking anonymity. The freedom to reinvent oneself or seek a new direction seems impossible. These adult siblings feel frozen in time; their maturation stunted. In addition, as the years pass, the shadow of anti-Semitism in the United States and the horrors in Europe hover in the Buffalo air.
Reisman’s novel explores the family interactions to offer an explanation of WHY Goldie did what she did. By probing into each of the character’s perspective (including Goldie), Reisman strengthens our understanding of their needs and longings. Their desires seem to center around autonomy and sexual fulfillment. Reisman describes her character’s daily thoughts and deeper aspirations with empathy and compassion.
I loved the aching humanity of this novel. I wish Reisman had delved into the details of these siblings’ early years, as it would have given readers a greater understanding of the dynamics between the family members in their adulthood. Yet, Nancy Reisman’s The First Desire beautifully illustrates how family love can both comfort and smother.
Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Applefeld
Some books entertain us. Some books teach us. Some warn us. In 2018, as our democratic norms are under attack, Badenheim 1939 feels like a warning siren. Author Aharon Applefeld should know. He lived through the Holocaust and then moved to Israel.
In the spring of 1939, the fictitious town of Badenheim near Vienna is preparing for its annual summer concert season. Europe’s best classical musicians, many of them Jewish, will perform. Because we know what awaits the musicians, their Jewish patrons and the whole of European Jewry, the book has a dark, absurdist and ominous mood. After all, it is 1939!
Appelfeld characters are neither heroes nor villains. What they have in common is their myopic focus on the minute details and larger plans of their own live, oblivious to the horrors to come. The dialogue focuses on the dimensions of the upcoming summer arts program: the artists, the pieces, and the instrumentation. Hitler, who is never mentioned, will invade Poland by fall.
As the season changes to fall, those who are Jewish are not allowed to leave Badenheim. Then there is a shortage of food. Then, mail and newspapers are no longer delivered. The insularity allows the citizens and guests of Badenheim to comfort themselves with stories emanating from their hopes but not from facts. They are told to register with the Badenheim authorities and the word Jew creeps into the language. Who is Jewish? Who isn’t it? The capricious authorities begin to decide who must stay and who can leave Badenheim.
Denial dominates the story. Eventually the Jews are told they are going to be sent to Poland. Those trapped in Badenheim imagine that they will board trains and arrive in Poland where they will begin their lives anew. The musicians will find receptive new audiences and many others will reconnect with their homeland. Some of those confined to Badenheim view their forced departure as a positive development.
Appelfeld does not mock his characters, but rather highlights the universal human trait of denial, both as necessity and tragic flaw. As the musicians and tourists soon experience the daily encroachments of their personal freedoms, they seem incurious (or maybe petrified) of what their entrapment might signal and they simply adapt to each new diminishment of their rights. You can’t blame them. No one could have imagined the depravity and horrors of the Nazis and their enablers. Even if the residents and visitors of Badenheim knew what was coming, could have stopped the horror of Hitler and the Holocaust?
Like a Kafka or Orwellian novel, there is an ominous and absurd tone that permeates the novel. Because Appelfeld’s readers know the barbarity waiting in Poland, the book is terrifying. From the opening chapter, I wanted to climb into the novel and tell the characters to stop talking about the summer musical performances and leave Europe immediately. But they cannot. It is too late
Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
I enthusiastically recommend Elizabeth Strout’s stunning book Anything is Possible. In the nine interconnected stories about people from the fictitious town of Amgash, Illinois, Strout identifies the defining experience that shaped each character. She avoids linguistic ornamentation or exaggeration and simply writes raw, clear and honest prose. Just as I was feeling judgmental or frustrated about a character’s choice, Strout zeros in on the dramatic moment or life experience that shaped that character and my feeling changed to empathy and compassion. Strout isn’t heavy-handed, maudlin or didactic. These stories feel authentic and astute.
Lucy Barton, the protagonist from Strout’s previous book My Name is Lucy Barton, is mentioned in most the stories. Lucy manages to escape Amgash and becomes a famous novelist. In one story Lucy returns to Amgash to visit with brother Pete and sister Vicky. Sitting in the living room of the home where they were raised and where Pete still lives, the three siblings descend into their childhood dynamic. With both petty and wise recollections, the siblings discuss the pain, shame, and embarrassment of their youth. Being poor and abused by their parents and ostracized by their classmates made their early lives almost unbearable. Still stuck in their small lives in Amgash, Pete and Vicky resent Lucy’s abandonment and feel pride in her success. As they talk, Lucy feels catapulted back in time and has a panic attack. Her two siblings jump into action and drive Lucy back to Chicago. Through all their suffering and bitterness toward life and each other, it is clear that these siblings love one another, if only as survivors of the same upbringing.
Strout explores how the aftermath of specific events continues to reside within people and results in emotional paralysis. The poignant shame of poverty seeps into these stories even for those who are now well off. Part of Strout’s insight derives from viewing her characters lives over decades. Like a detective, she shows how the trajectory of a person’s life can be traced to a few key factors. There is a lot of unmet need and unfair judgments in these stories. Strout understands the complexity of motivation, fear, and desire and eloquently captures the ways people can demean with cruelty or soar with grace. Anything Is Possible inspires us to be empathetic and understanding because with empathy and understanding anything is possible.
