Max's Diamonds

 Now in his 80s after a career as an attorney, author Jay Greenfield is publishing his first novel, Max's Diamonds.  Thanks to a small independent publishing company Chickadee Prince this novel will be reaching readers.  It is a suspenseful plot that takes us from Brooklyn, NY at the end of World War II up to the 1990s, showing the progression of how Jews in United States thought about themselves and how they fit into American society.  This is a story of inner conflict.  The guilt of being a survivor of the Holocaust, of being a child of survivors, and the conflict of wanting to fit into American society but always feeling different.

This is the story of Paul Hartman, son of Czechoslovakian immigrants who escaped Nazi Europe and settled in the Arverne neighborhood of Rockaway Queens, NY.  We hear the story from Paul's perspective, who as a young boy of 10 years old, looses his father to a heart attack and grows up first with the guilt of thinking it is his fault, then with the feeling that he also is somehow responsible for the death of Max.

Arverne is home to many Jewish immigrants who are struggling to make a living in America.  Paul and his family run a grocery store and share a small apartment when cousin, Max, a survivor of the Holocaust comes to stay with them until he can get adjusted to life in the US.  Paul is haunted for the rest of his life by the memory of Max, his tattooed number from Auschwitz and his mysterious cache of diamonds.

Paul's last memory of the lesson his taught him, "to beat them at their own game".  So as he goes along this is the message drives him forward.  It is a time of anti-Semitism in this country and Jews are trying to assimilate, to join clubs, attend universities and get jobs that have been closed off to minorities.  At a time in history when Jackie Robinson is the first black to play professional baseball. Paul gets accepted to Columbia and then to Harvard and then to a law firm as the first token Jew.

Throughout the whole story, Paul is never comfortable in his own skin.  He always feels like he is being tolerated or used, in his personal relationships and his jobs.  Though he is an extremely successful lawyer he still feels like he doesn't really deserve the accolades, and that it could all disappear at any moment.  At one point there is a chance for Paul to start over and move to Hong Kong and he sees this as an opportunity for change, "There would be an opportunity for new friendships and perhaps, romances in a place where he wouldn't often feel like the other - like the New York Jew who, with help from his father-in-law, made it big in a firm dominated by Boston Brahmins.  Although he had achieved great professional and financial success at B & K, Paul never quite felt he belonged here."


Greenfield has given us a well paced plot that keeps the reader engaged in the well defined characters, wanting to find out what will happen to each of them, Paul, his family and his employers. This novel also covers many of the subjects of American history, including immigration out of war torn Europe, and how the Holocaust was a well kept secret by the survivors.  Greenfield looks at how in the 1950s Jews were discriminated against in colleges and professional offices.  Also what it was like to be part of the American Jews or children of survivors, knowing what it was like to feel like a victim.

the Madwoman Upstairs

Catherine Lowell has written quite an entertaining plot with a slow reveal that takes the reader on a journey through the books of the Bronte sisters.  Sometimes it feels like Lowell might have started out to write a history of the Bronte family and then decided to write fiction instead of nonfiction.

We start the story off following Samantha Whipple off to The Old College at Oxford University. Samantha is the last surviving relative of the Bronte family.  Her father, who she still morning the death of, was a brilliant author himself and spent Samantha's youth home schooling her, analyzing the literature of the family writers.  There are among literary fanatics and scholarly circles rumors that there is a treasure trove of memorabilia, a hidden fortune of diaries, letters and original drafts of the novels that have been left to Samantha.  She enters Oxford also wondering about the legacy her father has left her. He had mentioned a book called the The Warnings of Experience, but she does not know it is real or was just his imagination.   Is there any real inheritance or are there just the copies of Jane Eyre, Wurthing Heights and The Tenet of Wildfell Hall.

Ensconced in the Tower, Samantha is studying with Professor James Orville who helps her unpack and understand the meaning of the novels.  On her quest to find her inheritance and learn more about her father, she encounters many obstacles along the way.  The reader along with Samantha interprets the meaning behind the words in Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey and Charlotte's Jane Eyre.  We try to imagine how the sisters got along with each other and their brother, Bramwell.  What were their lives like.  Samantha has lead a lonely childhood and lived in a fantasy world with the Bronte sisters as her friends.

This is a fun well constructed story that slowly reveals the relationships of the characters and leads us and Samantha to the truth.  Lowell has so many facts about the Bronte sisters and quotes from their books that the reader would be curious to read more about the Brontes after finishing this novel.

The Passenger

Following in the tradition of novels that plop you down right in the middle of a character's life,  Lisa Lutz spends an incredible amount of the novel slowly hinting at the part of the main subject's life that you have missed out on.  The Passenger,  is a well written suspense story with the perfect mix of current calamities to keep you reading and just the right amount of intrigue about our heroine's past to keep you trying to guess what happened before we all met.

The main character, who we will meet as "Tanya Dubois" is ending a bad marriage and starting out on a new life.  As she travels around the United States trying to stay one step ahead of her past she meets up with Blue, a woman who has troubles of her own to escape and Domenic, a policeman with questions of his own to answer.  As Tanya tries to decide who her friends are and who she should be wary of, she learns how to live on the run.

This psychological thriller will keep you entangled with Tanya as she changes identities, hair color and bounces around from place to place trying to outrun her past.  Finding out what defines you as a person and who you can trust and you cannot are the backdrop of this novel.  This book starts out written in a quirky humorous style that slowly changes as Tanya gets more desperate.  You can feel the pace changing as she gets more deeply involved in her effort to stay alive and out of prison.  Then as she comes to terms with her past and her need to clear her name and get on with her life.