Hester Among the Ruins (Harvest Book) - Softcover

Kirshenbaum, Binnie

3.56

135 ratings by Goodreads

9780156027502: Hester Among the Ruins (Harvest Book)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 015602750X ISBN 13: 9780156027502

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2003

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

History meets reality when biographer Hester Rosenfeld--very American and marginally Jewish--goes to Munich to research the life of Heinrich Falk and becomes his mistress. Born in Berlin in 1943, raised in the ruins of defeat by a generation of "murderers and cowards," Professor Falk is neither infamous nor famous--he is simply the German Everyman. Hester believes his life story could make for an important contemporary historical document--kitchen-table history. But as she uncovers more of his family history and its possible connection to Nazism, she finds herself reexamining her own feelings about her German immigrant parents and her complicated attraction to Heinrich. As the lovers' intimacy grows, each suspects the other of hiding something about the past.
With the moral power of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, Kirshenbaum's searing novel bears powerful witness to history's unforgettable legacy and its continuing impact.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

As if love affairs were not already delicate enough, in Hester Among the Ruins, New Yorker Hester Rosenfeld decides to write the biography of her older German lover, Professor Heinrich Falk. Born in 1943, and married for the fourth time when he and Hester meet, Falk seems a German Everyman, embodying the troubled postwar identity of his nation. To be near her beloved, Hester moves to Munich. Their affair is secret. She spends her spare time in her hotel room, writing up notes and congratulating herself on how happy she is in the role of Other Woman. But being in Germany and researching the wartime years makes her think for the first time about her own Jewishness, and about her elderly immigrant parents who were so eager to assimilate into American culture that dishes like Rice-a-Roni appeared nightly on the dinner table. Hester comes to terms with her own shame and guilt while building a store of belated anger that finds expression in the direction of her research: the Nazi connections of her lover's family. "With vision skewed," she admits, "I am on the lookout for bad behavior. I expect these people to be hateful; I want them to be hateful, because if they are hateful then the world makes sense." A closely observed novel with an atmosphere of constriction and suspense, Hester Among the Ruins is a riveting, unsentimental exploration of the limits of love and understanding. --Regina Marler

About the Author:

Binnie Kirshenbaum is the author of three novels, On Mermaid Avenue, A Disturbance in One Place, and Pure Poetry, and a story collection, History on a Personal Note. She teaches at Columbia University's Graduate School of the Arts and lives in New York City.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.