Among the Living
In 1947, Yitzhak Goldah, a 31-year-old Holocaust survivor, resettles in Savannah under government assistance with his Jewish relatives. There, he joins the family shoe-manufacturing business. Conflicts happen when the patriarch of the family tries to expand his business and the New York extortion racketeers of the Jewish Mafia interfere.
Yitzhak takes a job as a newspaper reporter, where he falls in love with the boss’s daughter. He’s a great writer, even though English is his second or third language, and surprisingly, his articles are wanted for publication in Atlanta and New York. The content of his articles is not disclosed.
The structure is unusual. For the 100 pages, there’s no discernable plot, except that the hero relocates to Georgia. Then a story begins to emerge about the evil unions in New York. That story disappears for 200 pages in favor of the romance between the hero and the heroine and the turmoil between conflicting Jewish ideologies. Meanwhile, another girl appears, Yitzhak’s fiancée, who has also miraculously survived several years in Terezin and Birkenau. With 15 percent of the novel remaining, the author gets back to the presumed main plot, the extortion by the unions, where a 14-year-old boy was feeding information to a reporter. There was no indication for 250 pages that the kid was conspiring against the hero, or that the teenager even had anything to tell. If there was, I missed it.
The title reflects the message: Those who suffered in the Holocaust had difficulty living among those who did not, even with those of the same faith. However, the hero doesn’t seem to have any trouble living in America. Only the female camp survivor does.
Some readers may enjoy it as a romance or drama. I found it confusing and a difficult read.
