I’ll Be Right Here
Bloom excels at creating characters who combine a profound sense of alienation with a desperate desire for connection. In this short but intense character study of an Algerian brother and sister, Samir and Gazala, who emigrate to America after experiencing the Nazi occupation of France, we are offered glimpses of what it means to have another person as your true home.
The first part of the novel is riveting – a first-person account by Gazala of her unlikely survival as the daughter of a Jewish refugee. Her watchful resourcefulness appeals to the author Colette, who accepts her as an attendant and loans her out to other once-rich Parisians. Through Gazala’s eyes, we get an intimate, realistic portrait of the weariness, complacence, and complicity of Vichy France. It’s a biting satire of the casual cruelty of the rich.
We then jump to 2015, as Gazala’s American found family surrounds her on her deathbed. The remainder of the novel hops around the 1960s through the 2010s and offers vignettes from the subsequent lives of Gazala’s adoptive sisters, Anna and Alma Cohen, their daughters, Bea and Lily, and all the men who orbit around them. Gazala and Samir are the anchors to this clan, enigmatic but joined by a love that keeps all the other characters returning to them through the years. More a series of interconnected short stories than a novel, these events unfold in non-sequential flashbacks, and keeping track of where each character is in their life’s journey will frustrate some readers and entertain others. All Bloom’s characters are thoughtful and appealing, representing a range of personalities, but all share an awareness that even the closest relationships are destined to end in loss. The elegiac tone of the novel might not appeal to all readers, but the prose is undeniably lovely.
