September 15, 2022
In the fifth of Zimler's novels about the Zarco family, mystical connections impart life-affirming meaning to Polish �migr�s who lost most of their family in the Holocaust. Told through multiple voices in various eras, the novel focuses on Benni and Shelly Zarco, two cousins separated by tragic circumstances. Shelly, who is 11 years older, makes it out of Nazi-controlled Warsaw first, escaping through the forest on his eventual flight to Montreal. A larger-than-life character who opens a downtown sporting goods shop there, he attempts to cope with trauma through his uncontrollable sexual urges for both women and men--including his close cousin. Smuggled out of Warsaw and raised in hiding in the town of Brzeziny by a gentile music teacher to whom he becomes devoted, young Benni is tracked down years later in Poland by Shelly. In New York, he becomes a successful tailor, loving father, and anti-war protester who struggles to see the difference between the Holocaust and the bombing of innocents in Vietnam. Forever haunted by the ultimate sacrifice his great-grandmother made in taking his place on a transport delivering Jews to a Treblinka-bound train, he turns to the cabala for answers. Tracing his Sephardic roots back to Portugal, he hears the thoughts of living and departed people in his head. So do other members of his extended family through their involvement in the arts and medicine. Dialogue is not Zimler's strong suit, and the long coda tracing the history of Jewish persecution back to Egypt is an unnecessary add-on. But the latest effort by the author of The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (1998) succeeds with its strong emotion, memorable characters, and mosaiclike structure. Zimler's handling of the continuum of time is both moving and unsettling. A thoughtful and affecting novel about generational trauma.
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Starred review from September 19, 2022
Zimler’s exceptional latest (after The Gospel According to Lazarus) explores the Kabbalistic belief that people are linked across millennia by a mystical light. The six sections range in time from 1944 to 2018, unspooling the riveting story of two cousins, Benni and Shelly Zarco, the only members of their family to survive the Holocaust. With a series of narrators, Zimler harnesses a sense of magic in the many links between the cousins, suggesting a structure to their fate, which provides reasons for why events happen and the ways the characters impact each other. For example, Benni’s son, Eti, recounts how his great-grandmother, gifted with “the sight” into the future, begged a policeman who was rounding up Jews to take her grandson’s place. Then Shelly’s wife, Julie, chronicles Shelly’s mission to find Benni in Poland, and a mystical experience in 1977 when Shelly’s 16 year old sister, Esther, who died in Treblinka, has come back to haunt him and inhabit his body. At the end, Zimler circles back to Eti, who supplies the missing piece of the puzzle that connects the Zarco family over generations. This is a richly drawn, original portrayal of tenacity and sacrifice. Agent: Nicole Witt, Mertin Witt Literary.