The Pursuit of Happiness - Softcover

Roiphe, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446363340 ISBN 13: 9780446363341

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 1992

Synopsis

Five generations of the Gruenbaum family contend with a host of pressures as they immigrate to America, build an empire in the garment industry, and finally turn to Israel for identity

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Concerned as she has been with the unique psychic journeying of assimilated American Jews (``masked creatures,'' she calls them in Generation Without Memory, 1981), novelist Roiphe here shuffles shards and snippets from 30 or so lives in one Jewish American family (from 1878 to 1990) in their pursuits of happiness. Then, in teasing homilies to the Reader, and with the narrative distance of a recording angel, this becomes a testament to the universal writhings and struggles of all humans to survive as best they can. In brief encounters, members of the Gruenbaum family are visited and revisited as the author flips back and forth in time. In 1990, Hedy keeps a vigil for her wounded daughter in a Jerusalem hospital; and in 1878, pious Moses and more earthbound Naomi Gruenbaum leave Poland for America, where their son will know that Naomi's (stolen) diamond has more power ``to protect them all'' than his father's ritual garment. (``Reader, you forget that economics precedes religion; worship grew out of eating, not the other way around.'') Through the years and lives, individuals are buffeted by fate, make choices, know the bitterness of finding themselves merely ordinary. Pious, gentle men falter, and others rummage for the good life; there are happy, as well as unhappy, marriages; and women cope in shoddy tenements, in handsomely furnished New York City apartments (possessions, to the newly arrived, are ``signs of safety, a nod of God's head''), and in the stark heat of Israel--where, in 1970, another Moses will die in the desert, a victim of ``an enemy of the Jews.'' There will be murder, desertion, exploitations (the Roy Cohn portrait is memorable), but also acts of love and great courage. Still, however, ``family stories are not morality plays, although they are about morality....Perhaps we are all here to make good stories.'' Moving and innovative--an ethnocentric intuition of the genius of an American family. A special pleasure for Roiphe's following. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal:

This is the story of the Gruenbaum family, who immigrate to America in 1892, build an empire in the rag trade, lose it, and find themselves in their fifth generation in Israel. At the center of the story is Hedy, who carries inside her the restlessness and pragmatic idealism of four generations of Gruenbaums. Hedy is the keeper of the family secrets. They pour out, helter-skelter, in a biblical tone of voice that can't help commenting on the action even as it mixes years and generations. The story is rich in eccentric and believable characters whose lives embrace the varied facets of Jewish-American life, from orthodox tradition to socialist intellectualism, from troubled marriages to gangland murders, from crazy uncles to rebellious daughters. The novel opens and closes with Hedy in the hospital in Israel, waiting to hear if her daughter survives a bullet meant for someone else. But she knows that the Gruenbaums, even in the face of death, tragedy, and war, survive. Good popular fiction with a refreshing twist by the author of Up the Sandbox (LJ 10/15/70) and Lovingkindness (LJ 8/87).
-Donna L. Schulman, Cornell Univ. Libs., New York
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0446363340
• ISBN 13: 9780446363341
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 579