A moving novel about a Holocaust survivor's unconventional journey back to a new normal in 1940s Savannah, Georgia.
In late summer 1947, thirty-one-year-old Yitzhak Goldah, a camp
survivor, arrives in Savannah to live with his only remaining relatives.
They are Abe and Pearl Jesler, older, childless, and an integral part
of the thriving Jewish community that has been in Georgia since the
founding of the colony. There, Yitzhak discovers a fractured world,
where Reform and Conservative Jews live separate lives - distinctions,
to him, that are meaningless given what he has been through. He further
complicates things when, much to the Jeslers' dismay, he falls in love
with Eva, a young widow within the Reform community. When a woman from
Yitzhak's past suddenly appears - one who is even more shattered by the
war than he is - Yitzhak must choose between a dark and tortured
familiarity and the promise of a bright new life.
Set amid the backdrop of America's postwar south, Among the Living grapples
with questions of identity and belonging, and steps beyond the Jewish
experience as it situates Yitzhak's story within the last gasp of the
Jim Crow era. That he begins to find echoes of his recent past in the
lives of the black family who work for the Jeslers - an affinity he does
not share with the Jeslers themselves - both surprises and convinces
Yitzhak that his choices are not as clear-cut as he might think.
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