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In Love, Susan Fromberg
Schaeffer returns to the theme of her highly praised novel,
Anya; how present destiny is often abruptly
changed by history and circumstance. With all the power of a master story
teller and a poet's intuitive knowledge of life's mysteries, she explores
the intricacies of love and the search for love in all its forms--between
man and woman, parent and child, sister and brother, and among friends. |
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Love is a novel that is
moving but not sentimental, complex but not complicated, amusing but not
comic. It is a story that moves the way memory moves, from one person to
another, from one generation to another, over time.
When the novel opens, young Esheal Luria is abandoned by his mother in Russia.
A mysterious woman, the zenshina--whom some call a countess and some others
a witch--takes him in and raises him on the outskirts of the tiny village
of Pobrosk. Later, Esheal goes to America, where he becomes a pharmacist,
falls in love with the wrong woman, and finds himself caught in the fierce
passions of domestic life. As he grows older and his daughters marry and
move away, he thinks more and more of the past, "so that a meaning might
emerge, a significance." He thinks of Pobrosk and the zenshina, whose
enchanting image, dancing with her hair down before the hearth fire, is ever
before him.
Through Esheal Luria we come to understand the iron forces which bind a family
together, making each a separate world "breathing its own air, living in
its own light, speaking the language of the same blood," and the forces which
can rip that world apart. Love is about how a man's destiny forms.
It is about the many deaths of love as well as its many resurrections, about
te surprising and often magical ways in which love proves victorious over
mortality and time. |
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"Love is itself an act of love. It is both a song of
mourning for life's brevity, elusiveness, and grief and a celebration of
its quirkiness and joy. It's also a family saga in the grand tradition, written
with skill and compassion and a crystalline eye for detail, and it is without
doubt Susan Fromberg Schaeffer's finest novel to date."
Margaret Atwood
"This poet-novelist's family tale has the intimacy of kitchen-table talk
over a glass of tea, flavored with the magic of folklore. Susan Fromberg
Schaeffer's writing has a tonality all its own: Love flows like an
enchanting tune, over the rhythm of the years. The novel is at once an
every-family saga, from the shetl cheder to the neighborhood pharmacy,
and a flight into intuitive insights. An original, a fine-tuned, and rewarding
work."
Meyer Levin
"Love is a compassionately observed and exquisitely rendered family
portrait--a richly human saga that holds the reader enthralled from beginning
to end. Susan Fromberg Schaeffer is a gifted storyteller--a writer to
treasure."
Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
"No one writes better about families than Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.
Love is a yeasty and richly mysterious story of immigrant Russian
Jews, in a form at once realistic in its pungent historical details and bleeding
at the edges into surrealism, the dream life of the characters, the irrationality
of death and generations...One of her great gifts is to take familiar material
and make us experience it with the vividness of first encounter. Susan Fromberg
Schaeffer writes like an angel, the recording angel."
Marge Piercy |
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