Elijah Visible P: Stories - Softcover

Rosenbaum, Thane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312198655 ISBN 13: 9780312198657

Publisher: SMP Paperback, 1999

Synopsis

With the publication of Elijah Visible, Thane Rosenbaum emerged as a fresh and important new voice on the American literary scene, a young writer in the great Jewish storytelling tradition of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Isaac Babel. In this haunting debut, Rosenbaum weaves together nine postmodern tales about Adam Posner, a young man determined to climb the American corporate ladder, who finds himself paralyzed by he legacy of the Holocaust. Encumbered by the psychic screams of his deceased parents, Posner embodies the disintegration, as well as the spiritual search, of the modern Jewish family. Rosenbaum's stunning portrait of the post-Holocaust world will resonate with contemporary readers of all backgrounds.

About this title

About the Author

Thane Rosenbaum is the author of the acclaimed novel-in-stories Elijah Visible, which was awarded the Wallant Prize for best book of Jewish-American fiction. A law professor in human rights and a teacher of creative writing, he is also the literary editor of Tikkun and writes essays and reviews for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and other national publications. He lives in New York with his daughter, Basia Tess.

From the Back Cover

Evoking the terrifying childhood and the seemingly successful adult life of Adam Posner, Rosenbaum reveals, through the haunting cadences of his fiction, that we all remain, however transmogrified as adults, the children we once were. No one underscores this realization more than Adam Posner, determined to climb the proverbial ladder of success, yet encumbered by the psychic screams of his parents and by the memories of a world where the sun never shone. The Adam Posner who emerges from these pages, stumbling from darkness into light, is actually a composite character, a mosaic of a man whose different incarnations overlap to form a textured collage that represents the lives of America's young and affluent Jews. The duality of experiences - the juxtaposition of the jaded, materialistic lives of the young with the wraithlike apparitions of an older, tortured generation - creates a stunning portrait that suggests that the mystery of Elijah the prophet may be slipping from our grasp and that the Holocaust was perhaps just a horrific prologue to the disintegration of the modern Jewish family.

Edition details

• Publisher: SMP Paperback
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312198655
• ISBN 13: 9780312198657
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 228