Flora's Suitcase: A Novel - Softcover

Rabinovich, Dalia

2.98

48 ratings by Goodreads

9780060932497: Flora's Suitcase: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006093249X ISBN 13: 9780060932497

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 1999

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Flora's Suitcase is an exquisitely written tale that brims with magical realism and offers a decidedly fresh look at the traditional family saga. Flora and David Grossenberg, a young Jewish couple, emigrate to Colombia shortly after their wedding and soon discover that the, clash of cultures--between Colombian and American traditions, between modern Jews and their conservative Russian emigr� relations--will test their marriage and family bonds. Bright with imagination and steeped in rich South American culture, Flora's Suitcase takes the reader on a funny, mysterious journey in a strange and wonderful land.

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About the Author:

Dalia Rabinovich was born in Columbia. She graduated from UCLA in 1987 with a degree in broadcast communication, then worked in TV production in New York for seven years. In 1996 she received an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and has taught English composition there and at Borough of Manhattan Community College. She lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly:

Rabinovich's quirky, wry and perceptive debut won HarperCollins's "Best Seller" contest to launch a first-time novelist. Her narrative focuses on an initially hopeful Jewish-American woman who leaves Cincinnati in 1933 and moves with her quietly domineering husband and their baby to Colombia, where she copes with culture shock and his obstreperous, Russian-Jewish emigre family. Three more children and a quarter century, later, Flora Grossenberg has been worn down by her manipulative husband, a textile manufacturer, by his venomous family and by Colombia itself, portrayed here as a deeply superstitious, backward country beset by endless civil wars. By the late 1950s, when Flora makes her first return trip to the U.S., she is full of suppressed rage, stifled by the wrong choices she made by bowing to her husband's will. Rabinovich, who was born in Colombia and now teaches writing at Brooklyn College, invests this exotic adventure with mordant feminist observations of cross-cultural misunderstandings, but her characters are too often caricatures (e.g., Bolivariana, the Grossenbergs' wizened, defiant maid, who claims to be freedom-fighter Simon Bolivar's illegitimate daughter; and Harold, Flora's eccentric brother-in-law, obsessed with mangos, who blows off his toe with a rifle). Flora's suitcase, symbol of her hope that she will someday escape her frustrating life, in the end becomes a poignant metaphor for her failure to do so. Editors, Sharon Bowers, Fiona Hallowell; agent, Jimmy Vines.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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