We are lucky to live in a time and in a society that expects each of us to fill at least some of the limitless promise with which we are born, whether we are male or female. We also know that many people fail to fulfill this promise. How do we fall from grace? How do we derail from this train of promise? Here are four stories, told by women, about women, that examine what we do with the lives we are given and the role environment plays in the outcome.
In Irina Reyn’s debut novel, the well-written What Happened to Anna K. (Simon and Schuster, paper, $14), a familiar young Russian literary character is recast as a modern-day New Yorker. (Published last year in hard cover.)
Here, Anna K. is a Jewish émigré from the Soviet Union, brought to New York — Rego Park, Queens, specifically — by her parents as a teen. Out of place in Russia as a Jew, out of place in the U.S. as a Russian, she is smart, gorgeous and moody, and, even as a grown woman, never quite at ease.
While her main character becomes more and more out of control, Reyn fills her fascinating book with rich and delicious (there is a lot of food in this book!) details about Russian Jewish immigrant life in New York’s outer boroughs, with its pressures to conform and its old-European social order.
Dahlia Finger, the protagonist of The Book of Dahlia by Elisa Albert (Simon and Schuster, paper, $14), doesn’t fall from grace because she never had much to begin with. (Also published last year in hard cover.)
Dahlia comes from a home that is not just broken, but shattered — shattered when her mother returns permanently and inexplicably to her native Israel, when her once-beloved brother turns on her and her father removes himself emotionally from the family.
Scientists study resilience, trying to determine if it is an inborn or learned trait. In Dahlia’s case, it doesn’t really matter, because she has none. Her life is a mess and she doesn’t care, that is, until she is diagnosed with a brain tumor.
While suffering through the horrors of treatment and the knowledge that this thing is growing in her head, Dahlia begins to examine a life she has, until now, left unexamined. She pulls vivid pieces out of her memory with painful honesty that is funny, dreadful and poignant. As the reader sticks with her — and you should, just as you would stick with a crabby friend who had cancer — the reader will be forced to ask and answer questions about how we judge a “good” or “bad” life. (Please don’t read the reading group guide and author “Q & A” until you’ve finished the book!)
A voice from long ago comes to us in The Dance of the Demons by Esther Singer Kreitman (Feminist Press, paper, $15.95).
There are two stories here, the novel itself and the life of the author. Kreitman was the sister of the much more famous Yiddish language writers, I.B. and I.S. Singer, in whose shadows she grew. That her brothers achieved such fame, praise and encouragement was a source of great angst to Kreitman and her novel addresses, in fictional form, some of the inequities she suffered being a young Jewish woman in early 20th-century Poland. Life for Deborah, her protagonist, is quite grim as she struggles — and fails — to go along with the conventions and demands of her family and society. Born into a world that does not expect much of her, she is rendered unable to expect much of herself.
In this case, some knowledge about the author enriches our appreciation of the materials and the publisher provides three additional essays, an analysis by Ilan Stavans, a biographical note from the translator (Kreitman’s son) and a short memoir from her granddaughter.
These three novels are clearly not lighthearted, so for a more uplifting conclusion, turn to Rachel Simon’s memoir, Building a Home With My Husband (Dutton, cloth, $24.95).
Readers may recognize Simon as the author of Riding the Bus With My Sister, her previous memoir about spending a year with her developmentally disabled sister, trying to become closer to her by participating in her favorite activity.
Now she relates the story of her and her architect-husband’s decision to remodel their 100-year-old Delaware row house. As most of us know, even the best-planned project is almost guaranteed to wreak havoc in your life. Simon’s experiences are no different, but each phase of construction reminds her of other times in which she struggled with family and with personal and emotional challenges.
Simon’s gift is the clarity with which she describes her own emotional turmoil, both current problems and the past family issues they arouse. Simon considers past moves forced by her father’s new job, by her parents’ divorce, and by her mother’s clinical depression. We move with Simon through the chapters of the book and the chapters of renovating her home, her marriage and her family life — to its completion.
The women speak
