March 13, 2017
In this moving collection of stories, Rosenfeld examines Jewish, Israeli, and American experiences by examining their many intersections and divergences. The stories, centered on such subjects as the dynamics of a kosher co-op at an Iowa college or an American struggling to find comfort in increasingly combustible Tel Aviv, explore competing senses of the self and the struggle to connect with places and cultures that are at once familiar and alien. This is felt most strongly in the titular story, when a young woman falls in love with an Israeli soldier while caring for his father, a Holocaust survivor living in Jerusalem. Even as she opens herself up to the possibility of true love, there is a distance between her perceptions of Israeli life and the cultural worldview of both her romantic interest and his Zionist father. In “Daughters of Respectable Houses,” another standout, love of a book by a Jewish writer is just one of many similarities between two women who at first consider themselves worlds apart. With humor and sadness, Rosenfeld illuminates how the self is at once informed by and wholly separate from culture.
February 15, 2017
Stories about Jewish life--in all its painful absurdity--in the United States and in Israel.Rosenfeld's debut book of stories is funny, touching, awkward, and wry. In most of the stories, not all that much happens: instead, Rosenfeld deals with the quotidian and the absurd. In the title story, a young woman volunteers to keep an elderly Holocaust survivor company. Mostly, she watches him eat onions. "Lotzi ate it with bread, one slice for every three bites of onion, and washed it down with a cup of tepid Wissotzky made from old teabags reduced to the size of walnuts." In "A Foggy Day," a girl takes piano lessons. In "The Other Air," a woman can't stop sighing. Almost all the stories are told in the first person, and most of these narrators share a common voice. Then, too, there are certain images, or motifs, that recur throughout many of the stories: lemon trees, migraines, pianos, and books--more than books: some of her characters read compulsively, for hours, for days, almost unceasingly. Rosenfeld writes with a dry, sardonic deadpan. Her characters are lonely, homely, maladroit creatures. In "Vignette of the North," the owner of a vegetable stand finds that an artist across the way has painted her stand. "Simona stared at a crumb that had settled on the painter's beard and wished it away. As the object of artistic inspiration, she felt almost entitled to brush it off herself." She invites him to her home to finish the painting "without all the distractions of the market." She expects him to add her into the painting. He might as well stay for dinner. "I'm a very good cook," she informs him. Inevitably, she's disappointed. Readers won't be. This collection charms with quiet, wry humor.
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