Synopses & Reviews
With the publication of Elijah Visible, Thane Rosenbaum emerged as a fresh and important new voice on the American literary scene, a young writer in the great Jewish storytelling tradition of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Isaac Babel. In this haunting debut, Rosenbaum weaves together nine postmodern tales about Adam Posner, a young man determined to climb the American corporate ladder, who finds himself paralyzed by he legacy of the Holocaust. Encumbered by the psychic screams of his deceased parents, Posner embodies the disintegration, as well as the spiritual search, of the modern Jewish family. Rosenbaum's stunning portrait of the post-Holocaust world will resonate with contemporary readers of all backgrounds.
Review
"Thane Rosenbaum is totally obsessed with the Holocaust. His stories reflect that obsession. They are written with sensitivity and pain." --
Elie Wiesel"Anyone concerned with the decay of Diaspora Judaism should read these stories, for Rosebaum shows great skill and sensitivity in depicting the aftermath." --Henry Roth, author of Call It Sleep
"A remarkable and original collection of short fiction." --The Baltimore Sun
"The nine stories of Thane Rosenbaum's Elijah Visible make for a noteworthy literary debut-not only because they introduce a distinctive voice to American Jewish fiction, but also because they represent a significant shift in how stories of the Holocaust can be told in and for our time." --Sanford Pinsker, The Forward
Synopsis
With the publication of Elijah Visible, Thane Rosenbaum emerged as a fresh and important new voice on the American literary scene. The son of two camp survivors, he produced a remarkable collection of nine stories of almost unendurable pain, interlaced with great poignancy and occasional humor, about the seemingly successful life of Adam Posner. A young man determined to climb the American corporate ladder, Posner is encumbered by the psychic screams of his deceased parents. This is a stunning portrait of two generations that suggests the Holocaust was a prologue to the disintegration of the modern Jewish family.
Synopsis
Evoking the terrifying childhood and the seemingly successful adult life of Adam Posner, Rosenbaum reveals, through the haunting cadences of his fiction, that we all remain, however transmogrified as adults, the children we once were. No one underscores this realization more than Adam Posner, determined to climb the proverbial ladder of success, yet encumbered by the psychic screams of his parents and by the memories of a world where the sun never shone. The Adam Posner who emerges from these pages, stumbling from darkness into light, is actually a composite character, a mosaic of a man whose different incarnations overlap to form a textured collage that represents the lives of America's young and affluent Jews. The duality of experiences - the juxtaposition of the jaded, materialistic lives of the young with the wraithlike apparitions of an older, tortured generation - creates a stunning portrait that suggests that the mystery of Elijah the prophet may be slipping from our grasp and that the Holocaust was perhaps just a horrific prologue to the disintegration of the modern Jewish family.
About the Author
Thane Rosenbaum won the prestigious Wallant Prize for
Elijah Visible. The literary editor of
Tikkun, he also contributes to
The New York Times and
The Wall Street Journal, and is the author of a novel,
Second Hand Smoke. He lives in New York, where he teaches law and human rights at Fordham Law School.