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.