Family Stories for Every Generation — Sylvia Rothchild

Sylvia Rothchild's stories have been praised for the color, the curiosity, and the candor with which they portray Jewish life. An early review of her work in the Times Literary Supplement observed that unlike "Bellow and Malamud, [who] succeed in suppressing the detail of familiar Jewish decor in their fiction, Sylvia Rothchild and other younger writers succeed by making it come alive through using the flow of their own vivid reactions to Jewish characters and milieus."

This collection of previously published stories exhibits the hunger that Rothchild shared with her generation for a place in the larger world, beyond the circumscribed culture. Unlike Malamud and Roth, whose stories appeared in Commentary at the same time as those in the volume, Rothchild was neither willing nor able to break with her past. Her stories reflect her empathy and understanding of the immigrants in the generations of her parents and grandparents, the generations that spoke Yiddish to children who answered in English, trading cultures in the process.

Stories like "The Golden Years" and "Home for Pesach" reflect the tension created by growing up between cultures. They are about values and habits of mind as well as character, carrying with them memories of a culture committed to an order in which the aesthetic and moral were not separated from each other.

Other stories, like "Celia in the Garden of Eden" and "Thicker Than Water," are about the relationships and conflicts between three generations. The difficult mothers and daughters are all spiritual immigrants, unmoored either because they are no longer in the country of their birth or because their country has changed so much, it has left them behind.

Family Stories for Every Generation reflects the changes in American and Jewish life during the last four decades, offering evidence that the human heart does not change as quickly as the times.