Like Never before Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Like Never before Book

The 10 interrelated stories that make up Ehud Havazelet's Like Never Before revolve around one big, if not invariably happy, family. The author introduces us to the Birnbaum clan--Max and Ruth, and their children, David and Rachel--as well as an assortment of the people they love and hate and date and marry and divorce. Yet the central focus in this sprawl of relationships is that between father and son. Theirs is also the most troubled connection. Max is an immigrant, a true if sometimes desperate believer, while David, even as a youth, is "aggrieved, put upon, a boy who carries anger like a stone in his pocket to caress." Growing up in Queens in the 1960s, the rapidly assimilating David rebels against the heritage Max has transported so carefully from the Old World. Yet David's defiance brings him little joy. "David," Rachel says, "was a boy constantly on the edge, of laughter, of panic, of some unaccountable act of friendship or some meanness that would leave you stunned." David is unsparingly drawn and quite miraculously lovable. However, all of the central figures are just as deeply realized--and Havazelet's frequently entertaining, frequently agonizing skill at presenting each as an alarming composite of beauty and ugliness gives this intensely realistic work what Annie Dillard once called a "broad and sanctifying vision." Near the end of her life, Ruth Birnbaum muses unhappily that "despite everyone's good intentions ... love hurts more than it heals." Havazelet's gift is to let us feel both how right and how wrong she is. --Daniel HintzscheRead More

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  • Product Description

    A superb collection of thematically linked short stories by the author of What Is It Then Between Us?

    A young boy in World War II is compelled to make a terrible choice: abandon his brother and save himself, or reveal his identity and face certain capture by the Nazis. A woman enjoying a private moment by her window is visited by New York City detectives telling her a murder has occurred directly across from her apartment, and finds her marriage irreparably changed by the news. An elderly man, on the last night of his life, finds his kitchen invaded by raucous, hungry ghosts.

    At the center of these stories by the author of What Is It Then Between Us? (winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award) is David, a man poised at midcareer and at the cusp of midlife, torn by his break with his Orthodox Jewish past, achingly uncertain of the future. A richly moving, often funny portrait of three generations of a family straining to hold together in the face of changing cultures and shifting fortunes, Like Never Before is a stunning new collection from a writer whose stories have been hailed as "astonishing in their sensitivity, clarity, and power" (San Francisco Chronicle).

  • 0374187622
  • 9780374187620
  • Ehud Havazelet
  • 1 September 1998
  • Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 268
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