Hester Among the Ruins (Harvest Book) Book

As if love affairs were not already delicate enough, in Hester Among the Ruins, New Yorker Hester Rosenfeld decides to write the biography of her older German lover, Professor Heinrich Falk. Born in 1943, and married for the fourth time when he and Hester meet, Falk seems a German Everyman, embodying the troubled postwar identity of his nation. To be near her beloved, Hester moves to Munich. Their affair is secret. She spends her spare time in her hotel room, writing up notes and congratulating herself on how happy she is in the role of Other Woman. But being in Germany and researching the wartime years makes her think for the first time about her own Jewishness, and about her elderly immigrant parents who were so eager to assimilate into American culture that dishes like Rice-a-Roni appeared nightly on the dinner table. Hester comes to terms with her own shame and guilt while building a store of belated anger that finds expression in the direction of her research: the Nazi connections of her lover's family. "With vision skewed," she admits, "I am on the lookout for bad behavior. I expect these people to be hateful; I want them to be hateful, because if they are hateful then the world makes sense." A closely observed novel with an atmosphere of constriction and suspense, Hester Among the Ruins is a riveting, unsentimental exploration of the limits of love and understanding. --Regina Marler Read More