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A captivating debut novel, Hidden marvelously re-creates New York City in the 1920s, from the hustle and bustle of the Lower East Side to the hushed hallways of the homes of the rich and powerful. In graceful, eloquent prose, Victoria Lustbader presents a fierce, compelling story of loyalty, forbidden desire and the end of innocence.
Both panoramic and intimate, Hidden teems with complex characters readers will embrace and remember for a long time to come. Concealing their passions and innermost thoughts even from those they love most dearly, the Warshinskys and Gateses love, lust, seize power, do battle, and strive to rule themselves and their city during a decade of turmoil at home and abroad.
The battlefield traumas of The Great War cement an improbable friendship between Jed Gates, scion of the wealthy Gates family, and David Warshinsky, first-generation American from New York's poverty-ridden lower East Side. David sacrifices his family and his Jewish heritage in pursuit of his untamable ambition, while, in eerie parallel, Jed sacrifices his private desires to assume the burdens of familial expectations.
David's young sister Sarah suffers the torments of a sweatshop and hardens her heart to the brother she once adored. Jed's rebellious sister Lucy becomes a nurse in Margaret Sanger's revolutionary birth control clinic. Sarah finds a tender love in sensitive Reuben Winokur, an immigrant tailor destined to prosper in his new country, but Lucy's path is more treacherous - she falls hard for David, who belongs to another.
David's mother Anna loses her struggle to preserve her shattered family, sundered by hatred and privation. And not even the Gateses' vast wealth can protect Jed's aunt Zoe from the violent abuses of her alcoholic husband, or his artist father Philip from the pain of his wife's rejection of his love and kindness.
Brilliantly evoking time, place, and person, Hidden draws readers deep into the past to illuminate the present. For nothing is more eternal than human feeling, and nothing more important to the human heart.
Review:
"Lustbader's debut novel, set in roaring '20s New York, updates the Rich Man, Poor Man plot with a Brokeback Mountain twist. David Warshinski, 18, leaves his Jewish family's Lower East Side tenement to join the army, where he meets Jed Gates, grandson of a Manhattan business mogul. When the two friends return from WWI, David cuts off family ties, abandons his religion and changes his name to Shaw, while Jed refuses to acknowledge that he is in love with David. Instead, Jed dutifully marries, fathers a son and goes to work in the family business, keeping David, a financial and marketing genius bent on getting ahead, by his side. Meanwhile, David's sister Sarah, a seamstress still mourning their sister Rose (lost in the Triangle Factory fire) stealthily keeps track of David, and Jed's sister Lucy, a Henry Street Settlement nurse, knows all about David's desires. Lustbader, long time fiction editor at Harper & Row and Putnam, and the spouse of novelist Eric, skillfully envisions history in the making during a time of economic and social change. She falls prey to a few family saga clichs (fraternal feuds, maternal manipulation), but is terrific in depicting her characters' work lives. She transcends the miniseries story line to reveal a promising talent in historical fiction. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"Victoria Lustbader is great at casting. Her first novel has a whole roster of convincing characters: an aging mogul, a weak heir, a brilliant outsider, a dying child, a cold mother and an abused wife. We've met most of them often, but she brings them skillfully to life in 'Hidden.' A veteran fiction editor with an extensive background in publishing, married to novelist Eric Van Lustbader... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) of The Ninja fame, Lustbader more than lives up to her pedigree. She has written a novel that is hefty but always fun to read. World War I has already begun when first we meet the Gates family, firmly ensconced in upper-crust New York society. Joseph Gates, the aging founder, is a man of steel with enough businesses to rival a contemporary conglomerate. His family resides in Waspish elegance in a 16-room apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park with multiple servants and icy codes of correct behavior. Jed, the grandson and heir apparent to the empire, feels entrapped by lineage and expectations. Suddenly, in an unprecedented act of rebellion, he secretly decides to join the army bound for Europe 'on the very day in April that war had been declared. It had come to him with the undeniability of a sign from God.' Despite his family's vigorous attempts to keep him away from actual fighting, Jed pours all his energies into becoming a crack officer and ends up in the bloody battle of the Marne. At the lower end of Manhattan Island, scraping along in abject poverty, is the Warshinsky clan. Like his uptown contemporary, son David is also desperate to escape, but his constraints are very different. He feels suffocated by his traditional Jewish family crammed into the tiny rooms of a Lower East Side tenement. He is willing to do anything to get away from their narrow and fearful lives. So, acting in secret, he too joins the army. 'Every day he reminded himself that he was moving farther and father away from home. To be doing that was worth even going to war.' David and Jed, having met only once in a chance encounter at a Manhattan automat, find each other on the way to war. They become comrades in arms and devoted friends. Both men are wounded but survive. On their return to the States, David turns his back completely on his past and his family. Jed insists that his status-conscious family accept David into their inner circle. So the Gateses take him in, and he joins the business. Now he is known as David Shaw, his presence explained away as that of a rediscovered distant cousin. The scene is set. From the moment they return to New York, both men are living lies: Jed refusing to recognize his homosexuality and David hiding the fact that he is Jewish, with the Warshinsky family still living only miles away in a world unimaginable to the affluent Gateses. Lustbader's portraits of life in the sweatshop society are full of the voices, smells and broken spirits of immigrants searching in vain for the prosperous new lives they thought America would offer. After David walks out on his family, his 14-year-old sister Sarah is forced to support the family by working as a seamstress in a dark and stuffy loft for $6 a week. The rules are so inflexible and brutal that 'she understood that if she didn't sew the lining on these sleeves perfectly and quickly, Pankin (the boss) would throw her out.' There is a touch of stereotype in the portraits of the women: Jed's mother is the rigid, dominating matron; his sister, Lucy, is the rebel who flouts all the rules, goes to college and works in Margaret Sanger's clinic offering birth control to ever-expanding families like the Warshinskys; Jed himself acquires a saintly and patient wife. But any good story needs setbacks as well as saints: Monty, a snarky villain, stages a deadly riding accident; the Spanish flu carries off a granddaughter; the Triangle Fire inflicts horrors downtown; and, finally, one of our heroes meets a tragic end. Lustbader's skill in making us genuinely interested in these characters does make her tendency to bump them off when they get in the way of the plot sometimes aggravating. Both families seem very prone to fatal illness and accident, but then those were more fragile times. In the end, 'Hidden' delivers robustly on its promise to take readers into another era. Lustbader gracefully avoids some of the perils of past masters of the genre, most notably James Michener, who dropped increasingly undigested lumps of history onto the page as his novels got longer. Her characters eat, drink, read, socialize and suffer in ways that feel authentic. In this remarkable and accomplished debut, she takes us as near as most of us would care to get to the conditions and backbreaking toil of the immigrant garment workers on the Lower East Side and also lets us sit at the candlelit dining tables of the rich and famous. Brigitte Weeks is a former editor of The Washington Post Book World." Reviewed by Brigitte Weeks, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group) (hide most of this review)
Synopsis:
Concealing their passions and innermost thoughts even from those they love most dearly, the Warshinskys and Gateses love, lust, seize power, do battle, and strive to rule themselves and their city during a decade of turmoil at home and abroad in the 1920s.
Synopsis:
A captivating debut novel, Hidden marvelously re-creates New York City in the 1920s, from the hustle and bustle of the Lower East Side to the hushed hallways of the homes of the rich and powerful. In graceful, eloquent prose, Victoria Lustbader presents a fierce, compelling story of loyalty, forbidden desire, and the end of innocence.
The battlefield traumas of The Great War cement an improbable friendship between Jed Gates, scion of the wealthy Gates family, and David Warshinsky, first-generation American from New York's poverty-ridden lower East Side. David sacrifices his family and his Jewish heritage in pursuit of his untamable ambition, while, in eerie parallel, Jed sacrifices his private desires to assume the burdens of familial expectations.
David's young sister Sarah suffers the torments of a sweatshop and hardens her heart to the brother she once adored. Jed's rebellious sister Lucy becomes a nurse in Margaret Sanger's revolutionary birth control clinic. Sarah finds a tender love in sensitive Reuben Winokur, an immigrant tailor destined to prosper in his new country, but Lucy falls hard for David, who belongs to another.
Brilliantly evoking time, place, and person, Hidden draws readers deep into the past to illuminate the present. For nothing is more eternal than human feeling, and nothing more important to the human heart.
Hidden is Victoria Lustbader's first novel. She was for many years a fiction editor at Harper & Row and The Putnam Publishing Group. Following that, she enjoyed a second career with The Nature Conservancy on Long Island and New York State. She is now a full-time writer, living in New York City and Long Island, and is married to novelist Eric Van Lustbader.
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"Lustbader's debut novel, set in roaring '20s New York, updates the Rich Man, Poor Man plot with a Brokeback Mountain twist. David Warshinski, 18, leaves his Jewish family's Lower East Side tenement to join the army, where he meets Jed Gates, grandson of a Manhattan business mogul. When the two friends return from WWI, David cuts off family ties, abandons his religion and changes his name to Shaw, while Jed refuses to acknowledge that he is in love with David. Instead, Jed dutifully marries, fathers a son and goes to work in the family business, keeping David, a financial and marketing genius bent on getting ahead, by his side. Meanwhile, David's sister Sarah, a seamstress still mourning their sister Rose (lost in the Triangle Factory fire) stealthily keeps track of David, and Jed's sister Lucy, a Henry Street Settlement nurse, knows all about David's desires. Lustbader, long time fiction editor at Harper & Row and Putnam, and the spouse of novelist Eric, skillfully envisions history in the making during a time of economic and social change. She falls prey to a few family saga clichs (fraternal feuds, maternal manipulation), but is terrific in depicting her characters' work lives. She transcends the miniseries story line to reveal a promising talent in historical fiction. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"Synopsis"
by Ingram,
Concealing their passions and innermost thoughts even from those they love most dearly, the Warshinskys and Gateses love, lust, seize power, do battle, and strive to rule themselves and their city during a decade of turmoil at home and abroad in the 1920s.
"Synopsis"
by Netread,
A captivating debut novel, Hidden marvelously re-creates New York City in the 1920s, from the hustle and bustle of the Lower East Side to the hushed hallways of the homes of the rich and powerful. In graceful, eloquent prose, Victoria Lustbader presents a fierce, compelling story of loyalty, forbidden desire, and the end of innocence.
The battlefield traumas of The Great War cement an improbable friendship between Jed Gates, scion of the wealthy Gates family, and David Warshinsky, first-generation American from New York's poverty-ridden lower East Side. David sacrifices his family and his Jewish heritage in pursuit of his untamable ambition, while, in eerie parallel, Jed sacrifices his private desires to assume the burdens of familial expectations.
David's young sister Sarah suffers the torments of a sweatshop and hardens her heart to the brother she once adored. Jed's rebellious sister Lucy becomes a nurse in Margaret Sanger's revolutionary birth control clinic. Sarah finds a tender love in sensitive Reuben Winokur, an immigrant tailor destined to prosper in his new country, but Lucy falls hard for David, who belongs to another.
Brilliantly evoking time, place, and person, Hidden draws readers deep into the past to illuminate the present. For nothing is more eternal than human feeling, and nothing more important to the human heart.
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