Tell Me How This All Ends Well

We time travel to the future with new friends in Tell Me How This Ends Well, the Jacobson family. Author, David Samuel Levinson, takes us to the year 2022.  It is the week leading up to Passover, the month of April in California.  We meet the family members, Moses and his wife Pandora who are hosting the Passover Seder with their brood of children, twins, Baxter and Dexter, and the triplets, Brandon, Brendan, and Bronson.  Mo is the oldest son of the Julien and Roz Jacobson.  Next is the sister, Edith who has been married and divorced and had some turbulent relationships over the years while being a professor at Emory University.  Jacob, the youngest though already an adult, is living with his male partner in Berlin, Germany.  He and Dietrich have flown over from Germany to join the family for the Seder, which we find out will be aired on television live as a episode on the reality show that stars Mo, a frustrated actor, and his family.  

The reader learns that in 2022 in the United States, being Jewish is dangerous.  Israel has been defeated and displaced Israelis are trying to come to America.  There is incredible prejudice here against Jews and there are even bombings on the Los Angeles highways.  Edith reflects on the situation of being Jewish in the US, “She saw their proliferation throughout the southern United States as an unexpected silver lining to the thundercloud that had been the final annihilation of Israel - a population of swarthy, desperate-to-assimilate Jewish men who, along with the women and children of the former Jewish state (though she had less use for them) had been “transitioned” abroad after Syria, Iran and Lebanon had invaded, conquered, and carved Israel up.  They’d put up a good fight, the Israelis, but they couldn’t make a go of it alone - the four million Israeli refugees America had accepted, the price the country had paid for its shocking in excusable neutrality nee isolationism.”

We see how the Jacobson family works together to get along through the holiday of Passover.  They bring with them the baggage of their childhood.  Growing up in an unstable family with an abusive father and  complicit mother.  Each of the siblings brings their different personalities and conflicts continued from the dysfunctional household to this current dinner table.

Around this family swirls the anti-Semitic storm outside, while the author also creates this interesting juxtaposition, with the German boyfriend Dietrich being the calming, rational force.

There is a point in the book where Jacob tells the family that they should join him in Berlin.

He insists that Jews all over Europe are heading to live in Germany, where they are protected under the law.  

This book is written with a very chaotic feel of disjointedness, jumping around in the storylines.  Living in a world that has lost its compass.  The character of Pandora in the second novel really makes me feel like she has opened her box and we cannot stuff all the words, emotions and thoughts back inside fast enough.

What To Do About the Solomons

This month we offer two books about dysfunctional families.  As the famous Tolstoy quote goes,

“ Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  Tolstoy also mentioned that there were several key aspects for a marriage to be happy.  Thinking about what makes a happy marriage and how those marriages affect the children they bring into the world we examine the novels we are reading this month.  So from that stepping off point we read about our What To Do About the Solomons by Bethany Ball.

While still here in the present day,  we meet Yakov Solomon, and his wife Vivienne.  They are patriarch and matriarch of the Solomon family.  They live on a kibbutz in Israel and are the parents of five grown children.  Keren is married to Guy Gever, and with their children continue to live on the kibbutz.  Guy works for his father-in-law.  Marc Solomon, married to Carolyn with their three sons all live in America.  He is a financial wizard who has found himself under suspicion in a money laundering scandal.  Shira is the divorced daughter who wanted to be a movie star. She goes off to America looking for adventure, leaving her 10 year old son home alone in their Israeli apartment, though she thinks he is staying with his father.   Dror, married and working alongside his father.  Finally,  Ziv the first born, who has been ostracized and left the family for Singapore where he lives, in a relationship, with another man.

As the story jumps around taking us from the present to the past, Israel to America and back we learn about the members of this modern day family.  Growing up on a kibbutz that now is having trouble staying in business.  How the lifestyle has changed, the children remembering the group living for the children, that all for one mentality, eating meals together, sleeping together.  Now today how things have changed,  they work for a common good, independently.  In America we follow Marc as he tries to achieve what he believes is the ultimate dream.  He survived the Israeli army training, where he took on the challenge of deepsea diving.  This accomplishment, which he felt would make him feel proud and make him feel whole is an important lesson from the novel,

“In Marc’s first lesson that no earthly thing can do that.  Not the money and success that come later: the university degrees, the blonde American wife, or the German sports car that takes him downtown where he makes a million dollars year profit.  He never forgets the cold dea spilling down the back of his wet suit.  Marc’s three blond American children will never understand his aversion to sea and sand.”

He is always looking for fulfillment.  It takes a lifetime to understand that substance of ambition is only a illusive shadow of what we thought we wanted.  

The Visible City

As I sit here looking out the window of my home in the suburbs, which is very rural, I see two turkeys running through my yard.  There are no close neighbors that I can see.  But like the characters in Tova Mirvis' book, The Visible City, I still love to speculate about what other people are doing in the privacy of their own lives.  I have come to the understanding during my adult life, that many times what I imagine is not always the truth about another person's life.

Nina is the stereotypical career woman who decides to stay home and raise her young children, three year old Max and his baby sister.  She is confused and lonely, while her husband Jeremy continues his law work with the fancy real estate law firm, she is home folding laundry and going to the park meeting other frustrated stay at home mothers in New York City.

At night Nina can look out her apartment window at the building across the alley and can watch the lives of others in their apartments without them being aware of her existence.  Over a period of time she follows the lives of Leon and Claudia across the way, watching what she interprets as a loving quiet couple at home in the evenings.  One evening she sees a young woman and man arguing and then having sex in the window.  She imagines the scenario that is playing out.  This turns out to be Emma, Leon and Claudia's adult daughter and her fiance having an argument before he goes off on a business trip.

Later Nina's life crosses paths with Leon and Emma.  She discovers that the story she created about their lives is not at all their reality.  Leon is self-centered psychologist and his wife Claudia is an art historian who has been trying to write about stain glass windows.  She is frustrated with her work and is hoping to live through her daughter, encouraging Emma to finish her dissertation.  Emma is losing interest in her work and wants to try something new, but is unsure about letting her parents down.

Just as Nina is searching for meaning in her life, so are all the other characters she encounters.  Her friend and fellow stay at home mom, Wendy, who left a career to raise two children is always trying to show perfection both in her children and herself.  She cannot bear to think that she is not the model mother with two exemplary children.  Nina is constantly feeling inadequate in comparison.

As we read on and all these characters lives start to intersect, the reader can see how not only don't we really know the people around us, but it is really hard to also delve into ourselves and really get to understand who we are, what we want and need.  How rarely we achieve the goals set out for us by our parents and ourselves.

Showing her readers what life is like in New York City, traveling in the subway and the lost subway stops.  Mothers gathering in coffee shops with the children.  The tearing down of historic buildings making way for new skyscrapers, each one taller than the last. Mirvis examines the interesting stain glass windows of  John LaFarge and the hidden subway stops that are left intact underground.
In an interview Tova Mirvis spoke about the stained glass windows as being impenetrable .  You need to shine a light on them to see the full beauty of the window.  Just as people are opaque and you can only see a part of them.

Though there are no direct references really to Judaism in this novel, Tova does say that the characters are Jewish and there was no real decision made to not write a book that was centered around the religion.  "There were Jewish parts that I arrived at along the way – one character was raised Orthodox but no longer is and this leave-taking impacts the choices he makes in the novel. Throughout the book, many of my characters are Jewish, though this isn’t mentioned explicitly. " This novel is a reflection of the author, as have been her other novels.  So that the characters do have some of the qualities and issues that she is facing in her own life.  Tova says in an interview with the Jewish Book Council, " Even in a novel that is ostensibly about other things, where my Jewish identity and interests are less prominent, I feel the Jewish part of myself present here as well. ....My Jewish self has always been inextricable from my writing self."

This is a wonderful character study novel.  You can find yourself in one or more characters and as the reader, on the outside, it is easy to see what the characters themselves are missing as they negotiate through their lives.

The Wife, The Maid and The Mistress

Ariel Lawhon has written a wonderfully colorful interpretation of what happened to New York Supreme Court Judge Joseph Crater.  Crater mysteriously disappeared in August of 1930 after leaving dinner at a restaurant with two associates, his lawyer, William Klein and his mistress, Sally Lou Ritz. Taking the bare bone facts of the story, Lawhon has woven a fascinating novel, that takes the reader through the days leading up to the disappearance and the relationships Crater and his wife had with Tammany Hall and the corruption that was happening in New York.

In the novel Judge Crater comes up to the Maine summer home he shares with his wife, Stella.  He receives a mysterious phone call while they are out to dinner and returns to the table to explain to Stella that he has to return immediately to NY and will come back to Maine in time for her birthday at the end of the week.  We then learn that he goes out to dinner with his mistress, Ritzi and his lawyer William Klein shows up at the restaurant while they are dining.  After dinner he stops by the theatre ticket window but finding out that there are not two seats left for the show that night he and Ritzi go to a hotel room in Coney Island.  That is the last the Judge is ever heard from.  Unknown men break into the room and while Ritzi hides in a cabinet they beat and carry away the Judge.

We then learn the story of how Judge Crater arrived at this point in time through the stories of Sally Lou Ritz, his mistress and their times together, the maid, Marie Simon, who cleans the Crater's New York City apartment, and whose husband Jude, becomes the police detective assigned to the case of the missing man.  Finally we follow Stella, as she becomes the grieving widow, though she never seems to really be sorry she has lost her husband, just her meal ticket and possibly her standing in the society life.  Through these ladies interspersed accounts, and carefully following the dates at the beginning of each chapter, the reader can try to solve the mystery of the Judge's disappearance.

For 38 years, Stella returns to the Club Abbey, orders two whiskeys, drinks one and toasts her missing husband, with the quote, "Good luck Joe wherever you are".  This happens both in real life and in the novel.  Author, Lawhon has used creative license to add characters and combine characters to flesh out the story of what might have happened to Judge Joseph Force Crater.

This is a fascinating tale that Lawhon has kept close to the facts while creating an imaginative mystery novel that keeps the reader engaged until the very end.

Shady Place

What an engaging story of a retired detective who has closed up the family home, with the help of his two adult daughters, and driven down to Florida to live out the rest of his days at Shady Place. Author David A. Byrne is off to a great start with his character Jim Phillips, who has to discover how to live and interact with people, in a world that he is not prepared to tackle alone.

If you are of a certain age you can either relate to the detective yourself, having lost a spouse and moving into a retirement community, or you can relate to the daughters, who are packing up their childhood home, after loosing a parent.  Now you have to help your living parent move on and help them continue to have a fulfilling life.

Of course the back story is that he and his wife were supposed to be making this trek together and she got sick and did not live to move into the retirement home of their dreams, well at least of her dreams.   This was not the plan that Jim had when he promised his wife to continue on without her. Of course this makes the plot flow with the cantankerous, unhappy detective not wanting to move in and not wanting to make friends in the new neighborhood.  It sets the tone for arguments with the people who want to befriend him and leads to his having to work to fit into the neighborhood.  It also creates the interactions that keep the reader guessing who the murderer is well into the novel, as he questions his relationship with each of the members of the development.

Of course against his better judgment he does get caught up in a murder that happens after he has moved in and also with his neighbor, who he adds to his suspect list, they go about trying to uncover the criminal behavior that is happening in Shady Place.  There are plenty of personalities to get to know in this new community.  There is Mike Johnson next door, who looks familiar from the crime scene in the Philadelphia precinct he just left.  There is Beverly, the attractive widow, who lives on the other side.  There are Jay and Tommy who help make up the golf foursome along with Bonnie and Lynn who the group includes in the weekly poker game.  There are also all the rules and regulations that Jim is not used to following, so he comes coming into contact with Linda who enforces the rules and also Samuel Thane, the Real Estate broker,  who is always ready to sell his home for him.  With all these characters there is bound to be trouble, arguments and even a fist fight and a car chase, except this time it is with golf carts.

Author David A. Byrne has started something clever and entertaining with this new retired detective in a retirement community called Shady Place.  There should be plenty of material to continue finding dead bodies and other crimes committed to keep Jim Phillips busy for many years to come.