A review in the Israeli paper Haaretz today has a very considered analysis of the historically-based characters in A Reunion of Ghosts, for which I’m beyond grateful. I’m pasting the entire review here because, though it’s free, you’d have to register to read it.

Four generations of a Jewish family tainted by Nazi poison

‘A Reunion of Ghosts’ by Judith Claire Mitchell features three suicidal sisters whose ancestor created the precursor to Zyklon B.

There’s a chart, concise yet precise, on the wall of the New York apartment shared by the three spinster Alter sisters. It’s a family tree of sorts: a reminder of the sisters’ illustrious roots, but also a memento mori pointing the way to the family’s end. Four generations, two continents and a Nobel prize, held together by a single, malevolent thread: the suicide of every direct ancestor of the sisters in the three generations that preceded them.

Judith Claire Mitchell’s novel “A Reunion of Ghosts” begins in the summer of 1999, as the three childless sisters conclude the time has come to end their lives, and the Alter family tree. “We like the chart,” they explain in the epistle that serves as their collective suicide note. “We see order and routine. We see soothing predictability and reassuring inevitability.” And so the book explains why the Alter family history, spanning 1870s Germany to 1990s America, must end in their apparently inevitable death.

Poison, both figurative and real, is the leitmotif of this family saga. By the time we meet the Alter sisters, they have been consumed, in different ways, by the unsparing vicissitudes of their times; their emotionally drained childhoods have led to inconclusive relationships and unfulfilled ambitions. Lady, the oldest at 49, has allowed herself to succumb to a gentle yet insistent despair. She dresses in black, “in the way of someone who finds making an effort exhausting”; she holds her greying hair back in a long braid. She gave up wearing a bra long ago, and “her sagging breasts make her appear rounder than she is.” She affects to be untroubled by her amorphousness: “It’s not like I’m trying to meet someone.”

Vee, the middle sister, goes braless too, but not by choice. Cancer and a double mastectomy have stripped her of her physical identity; many years earlier, her one true love was excised from her life just as violently and cruelly. Delph, at 42 the youngest, could be mistaken for the optimist of the three, with her untamed hair, peasant blouses and flowing skirts. But the tattoo wrapped around her calf suggests otherwise. From a distance it looks like a chain, but up close it reveals itself to be a single sentence, a restraint of another kind: “The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the 3rd & 4th generations.”

Jewish by culture, German by faith

Otto Lenz Alter, the father whose sins will in due course filter down to the fourth generation, had his fate settled for him early. “Three fathers,” his father crooned to him in his cradle. “Me, Bismarck, God.” But for a German Jew born in Breslau at the beginning of the Second Reich, there’s no chance of balancing family, faith and Fatherland.

First to be let down is the biological father, when Lenz decides to pursue a doctorate in chemistry rather than join the family’s dyeing business. Judaism comes next. Lenz wasn’t observant to begin with, and once he understands that his academic career would benefit from certain adjustments to his personal circumstances, he willingly converts. “Being Jewish was his culture, but being German was his faith,” Mitchell writes. Professional success — discovering a process for the synthesis of artificial manure, a guano substitute, from liquid ammonia — and directorship of the prestigious Dahlem Institute for Physical Chemistry follow. Perhaps Lenz’s pragmatic choices might pay off after all. When Kaiser Wilhelm II delivers the inaugural address at the institute, he says of Lenz: “His current work is crucial to maintaining Germany’s stature in the world.” It is 1911, three years before the Great War, and Lenz would soon have the chance to prove his devotion to the Fatherland, but at significant personal cost.

Lenz’s skill in tweaking ammonia into fertilizer saved lives, by increasing crop yields and feeding growing populations. But tweaking it there instead of here created something else, something capable of taking lives rather than saving them: the world’s first effective chemical weapon. When the Great War breaks out, Lenz — patriot and German above all — presents his breakthrough to the kaiser: “How is being dead different if it’s caused by chlorine gas rather than by flying pieces of metal?” Lenz asks rhetorically. The gas killed thousands; this, and the guilt that followed, became Lenz’s poisonous legacy to his descendants.

For a pessimistic contrast to Lenz’s optimistic, assimilationist tendencies, Mitchell gives us Iris Emanuel, Lenz’s wife, who provides the insight that the true cost of hewing off one’s identity becomes clear only if the anticipated payoff never arrives. As ambitious as her husband and more intelligent, her sacrifices — surrendering her family, her faith and, finally, her femininity — weren’t enough for her to be accepted by the intelligentsia. She’s a woman, after all, and the Belle Epoque wasn’t quite so beautiful for the fairer sex.

Cyanide, suffocation and drowning

Generation-spanning fiction of this type works best when historical fact serves as a reference point for imaginary lives, rather than as a raison d’être for the fiction itself. The early segments of “A Reunion of Ghosts” are founded upon recognizable historical affairs — what Einstein, who has a walk-on part as an acquaintance of Lenz, once described as the German-Jewish “tragedy of the unrequited love for the blond beast.” Although the characters of Lenz and his wife were inspired by the lives of the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber and his first wife, Clara, what matters more for this fiction is how convincingly their imaginary counterparts attempt to negotiate their pre-ordained fate — pre-ordained from the reader’s perspective, at least. Unrequited love almost always comes to a bad end.

Iris and Lenz, who end their lives in 1915 and 1934 respectively, are spared from finding out just how bad an end, as their imperfect era is eclipsed by the dark shadows of the 1930s and the Third Reich. Richard, their only child, makes it as far as America, at the end of World War II, before defenestrating himself; the knowledge that his father’s legacy was the basis for Zyklon B pushes him over the edge.

His three daughters follow the same path: cyanide, suffocation, drowning. Before Dahlie, Richard’s youngest daughter, throws herself into the Hudson River, she makes sure her daughters understand that their lives will always be tainted by their forebear’s actions. No antidote.

The principal strength of “A Reunion of Ghosts” is Mitchell’s astute and feeling characterizations. The panoramic perspective of decades lends the three Alter sisters — and before them their ancestor Iris — a sharp authenticity, a realness that intensifies as the years pass and they gradually, gracelessly submit to the existential despair that springs eternal for them. (The description of Vee’s battle against breast cancer is especially empathetic.)

Mitchell, director of the MFA creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has an ear attuned to the absurdities that accompany the banality of everyday life. What could have been a very bleak book is instead defined by a mordant sense of humor. “Mom in the river with rocks in her socks,” the sisters write, setting the tone for their intimate engagement with death. The reader is never allowed to, heaven forbid, feel sorry for Mitchell’s characters, as they never feel sorry for themselves.

But there is something missing, nonetheless. When measured against Iris’ futile struggle against the failures of her age, her great-granddaughters at times feel curiously stripped of agency. Through their eyes, their failed relationships and unfulfilled lives seem inevitable. But because they evolve through the book so vividly and fully, it is hard to reconcile this passivity with their realness. The introduction, late in the book, of an unexpected counter-narrative holds out a sliver of hope that they might yet escape their end.

Perhaps, one thinks, their suicide pact might become just one part of an affecting and tortured family history, rather than its last note. It is to Mitchell’s credit that the last quarter of the book resonates, despite the sharp turn in tone; with a lesser writer, the fate of the Alters wouldn’t matter nearly as much.

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A very nice review from The Buffalo News, although it begins with the reviewer taking me to task for failing to acknowledge James Lipton’s An Exaltation of Larks as the inspiration for the title.

Actually, I’d written almost the entire book before it dawned on me that “a reunion of ghosts,” in addition to being exactly what it sounds like (a bunch of ghosts coming together from far and wide to hang out and talk about old times) could also be read as a collective noun. When it finally hit me (I know; I’m kinda slow on the uptake) I did allow one of my characters to use the phrase “a reunion of ghosts” in the Liptonesque way–a gaggle of geese, a herd of buffalo, a reunion of ghosts–but it never struck me as necessary to mention Lipton’s book…nor the earlier, primary sources that originally compiled lists of collective nouns.

Per the link above, I’m remedying that oversight here. And you know what would be cool? If readers began buying both A Reunion of Ghosts and An Exaltation of Larks together, so that the Amazon algorithm began pairing them.

Is there a collective noun for a group of books that ought to live side by side on a bookshelf?

A Reunion of Ghosts is one of the New York Post’s “This Week’s Must-Read Books.” I’m very grateful–thank you, NY Post–but am kind of worried that the Post may be having a bad week: they’ve included my novel about suicide along with three non-fiction books about, respectively, Nazi concentration camps, massacre, and rain. Bummer. Or maybe this is all a ploy to drive up sales for the book about office supplies.

I’m absolutely thrilled by this insightful review by Rebecca Abrams for The Financial Times of London and also by the accompanying illustration by Simon Pemberton.

Here is the review’s final paragraph:

A Reunion of Ghosts is a very funny book but it is also tender, sombre and thought-provoking. Narrated in the first-person plural, it is often impossible to tell which of the sisters is telling the story, their identities and experiences merged into one collective voice — and yet questions of individuality and self-determination are omnipresent. Where do we as individuals stop and start? Can we escape the ghosts of the past? Can we shake off the lifeless beliefs that bind us? What is the nature of their power? Is it just a matter of how we tell the story, of what we give weight to, what we choose to ignore? Are we the playthings of the gods, or the deus ex machina in our own scripts? For Vee Alter, “the meaning of life had always been that life had no meaning, and the moral of the story was that there was no moral of the story. Things that seemed significant weren’t.” Whether author or reader agree with her is another matter entirely.

A new and enthusiastic review for A Reunion of Ghosts, this one from by BBC contributor Hephzibah Anderson and appearing in London’s The Jewish Chronicle. the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper. My favorite line says that Reunion is a “master-class in tragi-comedy (that) sustains its anarchic tempo until the very end.” Anarchic tempo. I love that.

Some lovely newspaper aggregator has spread the Dallas Morning News review of A Reunion of Ghosts far and wide. It’s been picked up and reprinted in a bunch of newspapers including, among others The Kansas City Star, The Lexington-Herald Leader, The Charlotte Observer, The Telegraph (Macon, Georgia), and several throughout South Carolina. It also appears in several Spanish papers.

…and, in one very strange case, it seems to have been translated into some other language before being translated back into English. In this version, rather than being an English Professor, I’m a “British Professor,” somehow “Son of Sam” comes out as “Boy of Mike,” and my first novel, The Last Day of the War, comes out as The Final Times of World War Two Inch.