Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate

May 4, 2015
Pogrebin's (Three Daughters) newest novel is an emotionally affecting but narratively uneven tale of familial love and the ties that bind. Zach Levy grew up in New York City, the child of two Holocaust survivors. From a young age, he is haunted by their tales of the Nazis and the infant son they lost during the war. Upon his bar mitzvah, he promises his mother that when he marries, he will only marry a Jew. This promise carries him into adulthood, as he casually expects his soul mate to appearâand be Jewish. Then he meets Cleo Scott, a politically-minded African American radio show host (and preacher's daughter) at a political event. They are instantly drawn to each other, and even with their differences, they seem perfect for each other. Eventually, she tells him that she's pregnant. He agrees to pay child support but decides to leave. For the next few years, he dates Jewish women with little success. Finally Cleo contacts him to deliver an ultimatum: he can either be part of his son's life or forsake all future contact. Pogrebin has a very deep understanding of the complex world of Holocaust survivor's guilt and generational inheritance of trauma. Zach's hangups are real and powerful. However, for a story that is ostensibly about a man trying to find his soul mate, it veers off sharply into a man trying to decide whether his son is legitimately Jewish, and whether he wants to raise him. Once it stops being about the overwhelming love between Zach and Cleo (which just seems to disappear) and starts focusing on concepts of Jewish identity, the reading experience becomes discordant.

April 1, 2015
The son of Holocaust survivors has a hard time keeping his promises to his parents. "By the time he went to bed that Friday night before his bar mitzvah day, Zach Levy had made four promises to his parents: that he would grow up to be a mensch, marry a Jew, raise Jewish children, and tithe 10 percent of his earnings to help keep Israel safe so it would always be there if a Jew needed it." Pogrebin (Three Daughters, 2002, etc.) shows us how difficult it can be to honor these pledges, as her protagonist's difficulties in finding a nice Jewish girl not only prevent him from raising Jewish children, but also lead him into some fairly unmensch-y behavior. The story begins in the Bronx, where 6-year-old Zach finds an old photo album with a picture of a beautiful woman and a baby. He is stunned to learn that it's his mother-now a miserable, pale, "voiceless wraith adrift in a sea of half-done chores"-and his long-dead brother. Zach spends years trying to ferret out the details of his family's tragic history, finally revealed by his father the day after his bar mitzvah. Both parents are dead by the time Zach meets Bonnie Bertelsman outside his office at the ACLU, where she's accosting passersby to sign a petition. They marry and have a child-but at that point things veer off track: the marriage ends early, and his daughter is raised in Australia. He's on the hunt for wife No. 2 when he meets the lovely, outspoken radio host Cleo Scott at the founding meeting of the Black-Jewish Coalition of New York. This somewhat programmatic novel comes to life as it dramatizes the dilemmas Zach faces by loving a black woman. A cleareyed, courageous presentation of Jewish issues, and not a bad story either.

May 1, 2015
As a small boy growing up in the Bronx, Zach Levy can't understand why his mother is so remote and sorrowful. It takes years of pestering his disciplined, hardworking father to finally pry out the whole horrifying story about how they survived the Holocaust, and how very much they lost. Heir to infinite suffering, Zach forges a life of remembrance and reparation, working diligently as an ACLU attorney and vowing to marry a Jewish woman and have children to honor the Six Million and keep Judaism alive. But this mission proves to be far more elusive then he imagined, especially after he meets Cleo Scott, an African American activist and audaciously provocative radio talk-show host and daughter of a Baptist minister. Pogrebin, a founder of Ms. magazine, prominent activist, and best-selling author of numerous nonfiction books and one previous novel (Three Daughters, 2002), writes with rapturous attention to beauty, piercing insight, bittersweet humor, and upwelling empathy and affection. The result is a mesmerizing, morally inquisitive, tensely perplexing, and enlightening tale of survivor's guilt and the incontestable force of love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)