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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English
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AMONG THE LIVING

Jonathan Rabb

A moving novel about a Holocaust survivor's unconventional journey back to a new normal in 1940s Savannah, Georgia.
AMONG THE LIVING is a moving novel by Jonathan Rabb about a Holocaust survivor's unconventional journey back to a new normal in 1940s Savannah, Georgia.
In the summer of 1947, thirty-one-year-old Yitzhak Goldah, a Czech camp survivor, arrives in Savannah to live with his only remaining relatives - Abe and Pearl Jesler, older, childless, and an integral part of the thriving Jewish community that has been in Georgia since the founding of the colony. There, Yitzhak discovers a fractured world, where Reform and Conservative Jews live separate lives – distinctions, to him, that are meaningless given what he has been through. He further complicates things when, much to the Jeslers' dismay, he falls in love with Eva, a young widow within the Reform community. When a woman from Yitzhak's past suddenly appears – one who is even more shattered by the war than he is – Yitzhak must choose between a dark and tortured familiarity and the promise of a bright new life.

Set amid the backdrop of America's post-war south, AMONG THE LIVING grapples with questions of identity and belonging, and steps beyond the Jewish experience as it situates Yitzhak's story within the last gasp of the Jim Crow era. That he begins to find echoes of his recent past in the lives of the black family who work for the Jeslers – an affinity he does not share with the Jeslers themselves – both surprises and convinces Yitzhak that his choices are not as clear-cut as he might think.
Jonathan Rabb is an American novelist, essayist, actor, and writer. He is the author of five novels: The Overseer; The Book of Q, and The Berlin Trilogy (Rosa, Shadow and Light, and The Second Son), a critically acclaimed series of historical thrillers set in Berlin and Barcelona between the world wars. Rosa won the 2006 Director's Special Prize at Spain's Semana Negra festival, and was named one of January Magazine's Best Books of 2005. Rabb has taught at Columbia University, New York University, the 92nd Street Y, and is currently an instructor in the writing department at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
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Published by Other Press

Comments

„In this amazing novel full of plot twists, Rabb examines true love, fair treatment to people of all races, how to practice honorable journalism, and what it means to be truly alive.“ Read more...

In the end, Among The Living is a love story depicting how people so hurt can possibly heal and move on. Beneath the gentility, trouble boils. Read more...