The UnAmericans

October 14, 2013
At the core of this debut collection is an exploration of those difficult ties that bind families and communities. Spanning a large swath of the 20th century, these are stories about the older generation of Jews who fled Europe and saw their courage tested: Jewish-American laborers, actors, and intelligentsia who believed in larger—if failed—causes, such as communism, and paid a price for their commitment. The stories are also about the chasm between fathers and their children, as well as between brothers. Antopol’s narrators are men and women of various ages, from America, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. In “My Grandmother Tells Me This Story,” a grandmother recounts her dangerous mission for the Yiddish Underground at Horodetz, once part of Poland but now in Belarus. “Minor Heroics” tells of a young man saving his older brother’s life on an Israeli moshav (settlement); the “The Unknown Soldier” is about an actor, jailed for a year in 1950 for allegedly anti-American activities, who tries to rekindle his relationship with his 10-year-old son. The collection crescendos with “The Quietest Man,” in which a former dissident from Communist-era Prague obsesses about how he is to be portrayed in a play written by the daughter he neglected. There are no happy endings, nor does Antopol people her stories with heroes. What draws the reader to her deeply flawed characters is their keen self-awareness, and their consequent ability to act with a semblance of moral, sometimes even selfless, integrity.

November 15, 2013

In her debut story collection, Antopol looks deeply into the lives of people whose geographies are not easy to define, such as the Israeli journalist who only feels alive when on assignment in Kiev and the California actor who claims more Russian heritage than he actually has, having lived in the United States since he was two years old. Within these compelling narratives, Antopol conveys not only the inner lives of her characters but also the political and social history they carry with them from the sewers of Eastern Europe (an escape route from imminent capture by Nazis) to the Israeli kibbutz to the streets of New York, among other places in the diaspora. VERDICT These rich stories, in many ways reminiscent of the work of Grace Paley (The Little Disturbances of Man), are often sharply funny and always intelligent, and readers will find them immediately appealing. [See Prepub Alert, 8/5/13.]--Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.