The War at Home - Softcover

Eisenberg, Nora

3.69

29 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0967952042 ISBN 13: 9780967952048

Publisher: Leapfrog Press, 2002

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"Remarkable. Thrillingly well-crafted. A brilliant novel."—Robert Olen Butler

Lucy Lehman has a secret. Everybody loves her eccentric family but nobody knows what's really going on. Her mother is a respected dance therapist, able to calm the most incorrigible delinquents in the Bronx. Her father, just returned from WW2, is a working class hero. On a good night they'll eat snack food for dinner, do the dishes in the tub while the kids are taking a bath and sing old labor songs. But on a bad night, when dad comes home in one of his dark moods and mom retreats to her bed, surrounded by the empty bottles of pills she's charmed out of neighborhood pharmacists, the insults fly along with the furniture.

Told with wit, understanding, and remarkable pluck, The War at Home is a warts-and-all autobiographical novel in the tradition of The Liar's Club, in which an inseparable brother and sister thrive in spite of the crazy household created by their parents and learn to raise themselves to survive.

The War At Home evokes the more innocent world of New York City in the 1950's, where lonely teenagers can find a safe haven in the Botanical Gardens and the Bronx River speaks of freedom as surely to two Jewish run-aways as to Huckleberry Finn.

"This is a profoundly moving and intelligent evocation of the magnificent terrors of family life, the ones that bind us to childhood forever: beautifully written, deeply felt."—Vivian Gornick

Nora Eisenberg is a Professor of English at the City University of New York. Her work has appeared in the The Partisan Review, The Village Voice Literary Supplement, and Tikkun. She is the co-author of four popular books on writing, most recently The American Values Reader (Allyn & Bacon, 2001). She lives in Manhattan.

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From the Back Cover:

Lucy Lehman has a secret. Everybody loves her eccentric family but nobody knows what's really going on. Her mother is a respected dance teacher, whose creative movement classes can calm the most incorrigible Bronx delinquents. Her father, just returned from World War Two, is a working class hero. On a good night they'll eat canap�s and marshmallows for dinner, do the dishes in the tub while the kids are taking a bath and sing old labor songs. But on a bad night, the insults fly along with the furniture.

Told with wit, understanding, and remarkable pluck, The War at Home is an autobiographical novel that follows an inseparable brother and sister who flourish despite a household in which insanity is the norm. Every page summons the lost world of the outer boroughs of New York City in the 1950's, where apartment houses tower over abandoned orchards, lonely kids roam the woods of Bronx Park unafraid, and the Bronx River ripples with the hope of Huckleberry Finn's Mississippi.

"Nora Eisenberg writes about the aftermath of war with remarkable insight and thrillingly well-crafted prose. The War at Home is a brilliant novel." (Robert Olen Butler)

"The War at Home is a novel of a child's brave journey though family madness, war and peace. Nora Eisenberg suffuses this story with the haunting immediacy of a first-rate memoir. The time is the late forties and fifties. The landscape is the Bronx, whose parks and gardens are mythicized as romantically as Bronte's English moors. This is an original, startling, and compelling novel." (Helen Yglesias)

"This is a profoundly moving and intelligent evocation of the magnificent terrors of family life, the ones that bind us to childhood forever: beautifully written, deeply felt." (Vivian Gornick)

About the Author:

Nora Eisenberg is a Professor of English and Director of Writing Programs for Faculty at the City University of New York. Her work has appeared in the The Partisan Review, The Village Voice Literary Supplement, Choice and Tikkun. She is the co-author of four popular books on writing.

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